If Pigeons Turned to Gold (2026) - News | Lubojacki

The Czech Republic has selected the documentary If Pigeons Turned to Gold as its official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2027 Oscars. The submission was confirmed today, August 19, 2026, positioning director Pepa Lubojacki’s deeply personal family portrait as the country’s contender for the Academy Award.

The film, which premiered earlier this year on February 13, centers on Lubojacki’s own brother, David, and the pervasive shadow of alcohol addiction that has long defined their family dynamic. Rather than a detached observational piece, the documentary is built on a raw, intimate foundation: decades of text messages, long-term footage, and a singular artistic choice - AI-animated still photographs that breathe life into memory. The result is described as an unflinching yet loving form of disclosure, a hybrid approach that blends the immediacy of documentary realism with the speculative warmth of animation.

At 110 minutes, If Pigeons Turned to Gold does not shy away from the messiness of its subject. The synopsis frames addiction not as a singular crisis but as a constant, a presence that siblings must learn to navigate together. Lubojacki, who appears on screen as herself alongside David and two other subjects - David Richter and Marco Arnone - uses the film as a means of forging a "sisterly-brotherly way of dealing with it." That phrase cuts to the heart of the project: it is less a chronicle of suffering than an attempt at shared survival, rendered through a collage of digital and analog traces.

The selection is a notable one for the Czech film industry, which has a storied history in the international feature race. The country earned its most recent nomination in 2020 with Charlatan, and its last win came in 1996 with Kolya. But If Pigeons Turned to Gold represents a different kind of contender - one that feels distinctly contemporary in both its medium and its message. The use of AI-animated photos is not a gimmick but a narrative device, allowing Lubojacki to animate the static past and confront memories that might otherwise remain fixed in pain. It is a formal choice that has already resonated with audiences and critics; the film currently holds a remarkable 9.333/10 rating on TMDb, a sign of strong early reception.

For Lubojacki, the journey to this point has been deeply personal. The director steps in front of the camera as much as she guides it, making herself a subject of her own inquiry. That dual role - observer and observed - gives the film its particular tension. She is not documenting her brother’s struggle from a safe distance; she is implicated in it, searching for a language, visual and otherwise, that can hold both love and honesty without flinching.

The Oscar submission process for the Czech Republic typically involves a committee of industry professionals who weigh a range of eligible titles. Their choice here signals a preference for bold, formally inventive work over more conventional narrative features. In a year when international cinema has increasingly embraced hybrid documentaries - films that blur the line between fact and fabrication - If Pigeons Turned to Gold arrives as a timely example of the form’s evolution.

The Academy’s shortlist for the international feature category will be announced in December, with nominations following in January 2027. The 99th Academy Awards ceremony is scheduled to take place in March 2027. For now, the film carries the weight of a national campaign, but its core remains stubbornly individual: a story about two siblings, a family’s inherited struggles, and the careful, imperfect work of turning memory into meaning.

Lubojacki’s approach has drawn comparisons to other recent documentaries that use animation to explore trauma, but her voice feels distinctly her own. The AI-generated images are not there to smooth over reality but to question it, to ask what it means to remember, and to reimagine, a person who is both present and absent at once. Early responses have praised the film’s courage and its refusal to offer easy resolutions - a quality that may well resonate with Academy voters looking for something that lingers long after the credits roll.

With a runtime that allows for patient, layered storytelling, If Pigeons Turned to Gold will now represent the Czech Republic on the global stage. Whether it advances to the final five remains uncertain, but its selection alone is a testament to the power of personal cinema to speak to universal themes. The pigeons of the title may be gone, turned to gold in the alchemy of memory, but the film keeps them alive - fragile, human, and unmistakably real.

Source: Hollywood Reporter