Switzerland has selected “Who Is Still Alive,” Nicolas Wadimoff’s documentary about nine Palestinian refugees who fled Gaza during the war, as its official entry for the 2027 Academy Award for Best International Feature. The pick, announced by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture, sends a stripped-down, formally daring documentary into a category that typically favors narrative features, a choice The Hollywood Reporter noted marks a departure from Switzerland’s more conventional past submissions.
The film gathers nine Gazans on a bare black soundstage marked only with white outlines of their old neighborhoods. Production ended up filming in South Africa rather than Switzerland after Swiss authorities denied the participants entry visas, a detail The National reported in its review out of the Amman Film Festival; South Africa remains one of the few countries Palestinians fleeing Gaza can enter without one. There’s no archival footage of the war itself in the finished film — the testimony carries it entirely, an approach Deadline’s coverage compares stylistically to Lars von Trier’s “Dogville.” Wadimoff, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the film’s festival premiere, described the project’s ambitions simply: “This isn’t just another war; it’s something else.”
Reviews out of the film’s festival run have leaned positive, if not entirely uniform. Cineuropa, which caught the film’s Venice premiere, called the result “powerful and minimalist in equal measure.” POV Magazine, reviewing its Toronto screening, found it an important film to sit with, even describing the experience as emotionally exhausting by design. Not every critic was fully won over by the staging conceit, though — The Film Verdict flagged the deliberately artificial setting as something of an acquired taste that could prove off-putting before the testimony itself takes hold.
The human stories at the center of the film have drawn their own coverage separate from the Oscar race. Forward’s reporting from Venice followed individual participants — one recalling beachside concerts back home, another remembering her family’s olive trees — as the group’s conversation shifts from nostalgia to mourning over the course of the film.
“Who Is Still Alive” is the third project in Wadimoff’s career to focus on Palestine, following 2010’s “Aisheen (Still Alive in Gaza)” and 2018’s “The Apollo of Gaza.” It’s produced through Wadimoff’s Geneva-based Akka Films alongside co-producers in Paris, Amman and London, along with Swiss broadcaster RTS. Watermelon Pictures, which handled last year’s Oscar-shortlisted Tunisian submission “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” will release the film theatrically in the U.S. this fall, following its Prix de Soleure win at the Solothurn Film Festival and a Best Documentary nomination at the Swiss Film Awards earlier this year, according to Variety’s rundown of the film’s awards run so far.
Switzerland joins Kosovo, Slovakia and Turkey among the countries that have announced their 2027 submissions so far. The category has occasionally embraced documentaries before — Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s “Flee” earned three nominations in 2021, and Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s “Honeyland” became the first Macedonian film nominated for an Oscar in 2019 — though the field remains dominated by narrative work. AMPAS will reveal its 15-film shortlist on December 15, with five nominees following on January 21 ahead of the March 14 ceremony.
