Jordan has withdrawn a documentary about Nagorno-Karabakh as its official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, citing ‘diplomatic pressure’ from Azerbaijan.

On Monday, Jordanian daily Al Ghad and its English-language service Jordan News, cited the Jordanian Royal Film Commission (RFC) as confirming that they had withdrawn their submission of the documentary My Sweet Land to the 2025 Oscars ‘due to diplomatic pressure’.

In their statement, the RFC said that they had funded the film in 2021, and that it had received awards when it was screened at the Amman International FIlm Festival in July.

The film’s producer, Azza Hourani, told Al Ghad and Jordan News that film’s crew had been under ‘invisible diplomatic pressure from Azerbaijan, which led to demands that Jordan withdraw it from its submission [to the Oscars].’

‘The news that an emotional story about a child’s love for his home and family would get banned and silenced came as a shock to our team’, said Hourani.

Al Ghad later deleted their article about the RFC’s decision to withdraw the submission.

My Sweet Land is directed by Sareen Hairabedian, an Armenian–Jordanian documentary filmmaker.

The film tells the story of an 11-year-old Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian boy named Vrej, who dreams of becoming a dentist. However, his life takes a sudden turn when the Second Nagorno-Karabakh war erupts in 2020, forcing him to flee the region with his family. Upon returning to his village, he confronts the devastation, new power dynamics, and an educational system that prepares children for future battles.

Deadline, a US entertainment media outlet, reported on the RFC’s withdrawal of the submission on 8 November, with the Commission confirming that it was ‘due to diplomatic pressure’.

They reported that the Azerbaijani government pressured Jordan’s Foreign Ministry to reconsider the film’s selection as its Oscars entry, ‘which in turn put pressure on the Jordan’s Royal Film Commission to withdraw the film’.

On Sunday, Aykhan Hajizada, spokesperson of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, welcomed the decision and insisted that ‘there is no question of any pressure here’. 

He confirmed that they had ‘immediately conveyed concerns’ to the Jordanian side, ‘considering that the film is against the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan’. 

‘It was the independent decision of the Jordanian Royal Film Commission not to submit the film for the Oscar award and to stop the screening of the film in Jordan’, Hajizada said. 

In an interview with Deadline, Hairabedian and Hourani also noted that Azerbaijan’s Embassy filed a complaint against screening the film publicly in Jordan.

‘So, My Sweet Land, a film that was celebrated weeks prior at the festival, was suddenly banned in one of its home countries,’ the filmmakers said.

My Sweet Land is the second film about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to be snubbed for an Oscars’s submission, with Armenia nominating the comedy drama Yasha and Leonid Brezhnev over 1489, an award-winning documentary about the 2020 war.

According to Armenia’s High Commissioner for Diaspora Affairs, Jordan is home to around 3,000 Armenians descended from those forcibly displaced during the Armenian Genocide.