Los Angeles: Austria's Holocaust-era drama The Counterfeiters won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film on Sunday, the country's first award in the category.
The movie about a group of Jews who produce counterfeit currency for the Nazis in a concentration camp in order to undermine the US and British economies, beat out films from Israel, Kazakhstan, Poland and Russia.
"There have been some great Austrian filmmakers working here," said director Stefan Ruzowitzky, receiving the award.
"Most of them had to leave my country because of the Nazis, so it sort of makes sense that the first Austrian film to win the Oscar was about the Nazis' crimes."
The list of nominees for best foreign film Academy Award this year has come under heavy fire from critics, who felt that some of the best works from abroad had been mysteriously overlooked.
They singled out Romania's abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Israel's The Band's Visit, which was disqualified because more than 50 per cent of the dialogue between an Egyptian band and Israeli villagers was in English, albeit mostly broken English.
When asked about the controversy at a news conference backstage at the Kodak Theatre, Ruzowitzky replied: "For me, forgive me, but it was more important to be nominated than to be worried about those who were not nominated."
Nazi Sympathisers
Ruzowitzky has said he always wanted to make a film about Nazi issues as a grandchild of Nazi sympathizers and a citizen of a country grappling with its past.
"Being an Austrian and having been raised in Germany, the Third Reich and the Nazis ... this is part of your history, the country's history and also my family's history and so I always felt I should make a comment... on this period of time," he said.
The film, based on real events, tells the story of a master Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch, a pragmatist who puts his own survival first until the moral burden of helping the Nazi war effort becomes a burden too heavy to bear.
The theme bears similarities to that of last year's foreign film Oscar winner The Lives Of Others, a German picture about a man who spies for the Communist-era secret police but struggles to live with his conscience.
Ruzowitzky said he hoped the win would provide a spur to Austrian filmmaking. "I hope very much that this award will help us Austrian filmmakers to make film in Austria stronger, and put more pressure on the politicians to support the film industry as well," he said.
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