‘My Sweet Land’ Team on Doc Pulled as Jordan’s Oscar Entry

Jordan recently pulled the documentary “My Sweet Land” as its official entry for the Oscars best international feature film race after receiving pressure from Azerbaijan, in a blatant case of a country bowing to censorship dictated by diplomacy.

“My Sweet Land” follows the life of an 11-year-old boy named Vrej who dreams of becoming a dentist in Artsakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within the Nagorno-Karabakh region of southwestern Azerbaijan. For three decades, the enclave has been at the center of an intermittent war that ended in 2023 with an Azerbaijani offensive that caused a mass exodus of the ethnic Armenian population.

The government of Azerbaijan now seems to want to erase all traces of their conflict with ethnic Armenians in the disputed region — and Jordan was apparently willing to comply with that. As “My Sweet Land’s” Jordanian-Armenian director Sareen Hairabedian tells Variety, “We don’t understand why Azerbaijan would be able to pressure a country like Jordan and control a narrative that is coming out of Jordan for this film to be stopped and silenced.”

Representatives for Jordan’s Oscars committee did not respond to Variety‘s request for comment.

Below, Hairabedian and the doc’s Jordanian producer Azza Hourani further discuss their reaction to the country’s shocking about-face and some of the reasons behind it.

How did you find out that Jordan had pulled the film?

Sareen Hairabedian: I need to provide some context because we had also learned that the film had been banned in Jordan. But basically, I think the moment we heard about the film being withdrawn was when we got an email from the Academy. After learning that the film had been banned in Jordan — while at the same time it had also been put forth as the country’s Oscar candidate — we were working tirelessly to secure a qualifying theatrical run somewhere else, and that was going to be Armenia. We had planned…