Oscars: Cameroon’s ‘The Planter’s Plantation’ Starring Nkem Owoh Selected For Academy Awards

With the recent controversies rocking the Nigerian Oscar Selection Committee (NOSC), ‘The Planters Plantation’, featuring Nollywood’s Nkem Owoh, has been selected as Cameroon’s entry for the 2023 Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awards, otherwise called The Oscars.

The Nollywood star played a lead role in Planter’s Plantation, Cameroon’s fifth Oscar entry.

Cameroon submitted a film for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (IFF) for the first time in 1980. The film was titled ‘Our Daughter.’

IFF is handed out annually by the United States Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States that contains non-English dialogue primarily.

For the second year in a row, earlier this month, the Nigerian Oscar Selection Committee (NOSC) announced that no Nigerian film is eligible for the International Feature Film category of the 2023 Oscars.

Nigeria’s last Oscar submission was “The Milkmaid” in 2020.

This decision generated furore as the Committee received and deliberated over three prominent films, Kunle Afolayan’s ‘Aníkúlápó’, Mo Abudu’s ‘Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman’ and Femi Adebayo’s ‘King of Thieves.’

While the controversy rages, the Board of the Cameroon Film Industry has submitted ‘The Planter’s Plantation’, directed by Eystein Young.

Shot in Cameroon, ‘The Planters Plantation’ is set in 1960s West Africa. At independence, James Whitaker (Alexander David Silverstone Powers) bequeaths his plantation to Mr Planter (Nkem Owoh).

Years later, Mr Planter’s daughter finds herself battling family and society to preserve her late father’s legacy, a colonial plantation left to him at independence amid disagreements, betrayal and secrets.