ROME — Italy is heading to the Oscars with a 33-year-old Director and a horror film that beat out 20 contenders with a wide range of styles and inspirations, including Nanni Moretti’s Succederà questa notte. Unlike many previous years, this year’s selection had neither an obvious favorite nor a film coming off a major international competition win.

After leaving the Venice Film Festival empty-handed, Paolo Strippoli’s L’Estranea (The Stranger) quickly began the march across the Atlantic, finishing second in the Audience Awards at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness section. Yesterday, it was selected to represent Italy in the next Oscar race by a committee established by ANICA and made up of Giorgio Carlo Brugnoni, Cristina Comencini, Federica Lucisano, Francesco Melzi D’Eril and Niccolò Vivarelli.

“It’s a new kind of film, a genre film by a young director who has only recently begun his career and has been appreciated by audiences and critics both in Italy and abroad,” the committee said in its citation.

The only film that remained in the running alongside L’Estranea was Marco Bechis’ Ritorno a Buenos Aires, praised for both its form and its powerful social critique. The final decision may also have been influenced by reports that the film, which opens in Italy on Oct. 8, will be released in the United States by a major distributor, whose name has not yet been disclosed.

For Strippoli, who was in Los Angeles yesterday for a pair of screenings in the coming days, his alarm went off early. “I thought something bad had happened. Instead, it was something wonderful. I’m incredibly excited,” he said with a smile over Zoom. “I don’t know what to expect from this journey. I can only say that this film was made with a great deal of freedom, and we’ll continue to work that way, including throughout this campaign, which fills us with joy.”

The competition will be fierce. Among the films submitted by other countries are France’s Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Spain’s La Bola negra by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, Romanian Director Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner Fjord, Japan’s All of a Sudden by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, South Korea’s Possible Love by Lee Chang-dong and Hungarian Director Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend.

“This selection is a huge signal,” Strippoli says, “because ours is a genre film. It plays with thriller and horror. It’s a hybrid that speaks about the contemporary world to contemporary audiences, with a dose of recklessness.”

The first hurdle is the Academy’s 15-Film International feature shortlist, due to be announced Dec. 15.

“I feel privileged. I hope this choice also influences the decisions that industry decision makers make going forward. I think it’s right that people in their 30s like me have a voice and the opportunity to keep making films, but that requires trust, and for years there was a lack of it.”

The old image of Italian cinema as the kind of cinema Americans love now seems like an outdated stereotype. The Academy has undergone major changes, both in its rules and, of course, in its membership.

“Italian cinema is in my DNA. The film has its roots in a certain kind of melodrama, and then ‘dirties it up’ with darker genre elements. The story is very specific. It begins in a particular era, during a deeply Italian Ferragosto, and is set in 1999 among the new rich of that summer in Bari. Compared with other films previously chosen for the Oscars, L’Estranea has rougher edges, a little more bite. I don’t know whether that will pay off, but I’m deeply happy that these characteristics have a chance.”

Paolo Del Brocco, CEO of Rai Cinema, which produced the film with Propaganda Italia in association with Dinamo, calls it “a courageous film that uses the language of genre cinema to tell a story about family ties, fears and the deepest vulnerabilities of human beings.” But he understands what matters now is the U.S. release campaign.

“I’ve handled the last three campaigns,” Del Brocco says. “Two of them were pretty tough. This time is different. We have a distributor with real clout. I’ll just say that when we were traveling around with Matteo Garrone for Io Capitano, one night we had to pay for dinner for the distributor. In other words, without a U.S. distributor that strongly believes in the film, the campaign is ‘Mission: Impossible,’ or almost. In this case, we’re already one step ahead.”

For Italian cinema, the moment is not an easy one. There were no Italian films in competition at either the Berlinale or Cannes, no awards at Venice, and Le Monde has just published a sharply critical assessment, arguing that Italian cinema is suffering from a “great depression” compounded by “obstacles worsened by the rise to power of Giorgia Meloni.” The newspaper also noted that the country’s most recent Oscar remains Paolo Sorrentino’s win for The Great Beauty.

“I haven’t seen the other Italian films in competition at Venice,” Strippoli says, “but I’ve heard very good things about them. It’s extremely painful to see that they aren’t currently at the top of the Cinetel rankings, but I also think we shouldn’t defeat ourselves before we start. Italian cinema is very often attacked. I believe, instead, that it has tremendous strength, and that we need to stop feeding the narrative that ours is a failing industry. I’d like us to talk a little more about the quality we manage to produce from time to time, and to instill confidence in the audiences.”

The Oscar nominations are scheduled to be announced Jan. 21, with the ceremony set for March 14 in Los Angeles.

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