Santiago Mitre latest film is hopin’ for a little Oscars glory…

Argentina has submitted the 41-year-old Argentine film director and screenwriter’s political drama Argentina, 1985 into the Academy Awards’ Best International Film race.

Mitre’s drama, which debuted in Competition at the Venice Film Festival, winning the Fipresci prize, is inspired by real-life Argentinian lawyers Julio Strassera and

The David and Goliath tale follows how the pair and their young legal team daringly prosecuted members of the former military junta to bring justice to the victims of their deadly regime. Under their rule from 1976 to 1983, an estimated 30,000 people disappeared.

Award-winning actor Ricardo Darin plays Strassera alongside Peter Lanzani as Ocampo.

Mitre wrote the screenplay with Mariano Llinás.

Argentina has garnered seven nominations to date for Sergio Renán’s The Truce (1974), Maria Luisa Bemberg’s Camila (1984), Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story (1985), Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998), Juan José Campanella’s Son Of The Bride (2001), and Campanella’s The Secret In Their Eyes (2009) and Damian Szifrón’s Wild Tales (2014).

Two of them went on to win the Oscar: The Secret In Their Eyes, exploring a crime through the eyes of numerous witnesses, and The Official Story about an upper-middle class woman who comes to suspect that her adopted daughter could be the child of someone who disappeared under the dictatorship.