One of the most memorable scenes in a movie last year can be found in a blink-and-you’ll-miss moment in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. A young woman named Haemi (Jun Jong-seo), back from her travels in Africa, demonstrates the native “dance of Great Hunger”—which involves a lot of arm flailing—to a group of rich people she barely knows. They’re friends of Ben (Steven Yeun), a man she met on her trip: a charming, well-off Seoulite who’s subtly menacing. He also becomes a romantic obstacle for her friend Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), also present, who’s pining for Haemi. While Haemi is dancing at the bar, with everyone awkwardly, unenthusiastically clapping along, Jongsu catches Ben mid-yawn, before he quickly turns it into a bashful smile. It’s a subtle switch that happens in Ben’s fascination with Haemi, a switch that later on informs a sinister subtext. Burning is a film that raises more questions than it answers, a slow-simmer thriller about warring masculinities that landed South Korea its very first spot on the Academy Awards shortlist—the only time in 57 years and 30 submissions that the country has gotten so far in the Oscars race.

Burning has had, by all accounts, a successful year, starting with the record-high jury score of 3.8 at Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered. It continued to garner critical acclaim, and by the end of the year, Steven Yeun was honored as Best Supporting Actor at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards. (Not that that’s a direct indication of an Oscar nod for the film.) Yeun’s chances were a slim shot from the get-go, despite his being a clear front-runner for the category—his performance lacked the showiness of more Oscar-acknowledged roles (he didn’t eat a raw bison liver on a mountainside, for example). But the omission of Burning from the Oscars, especially as a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, is still perplexing, if not exactly a surprise.

The first time I felt like Korean films actually had a chance at touching the golden statue was 2016. Early festival buzz started generating for Park Chan-wook’s salacious queer thriller, The Handmaiden. There was also Na Hong-jin’s supernatural horror, The Wailing, about a mysterious illness that infects the population of a small rural village. Both were ambitious, epic projects from technical masters. Instead, by late summer that year, Korea submitted the stuffy period piece The Age of Shadows, perhaps thinking this Japanese-occupation thriller was “safe” for the even stuffier Academy crowd who prefer war dramas, or perhaps thinking its distribution from American studio Warner Bros. would make it a more favorable and accessible pick. Though as adequate of a movie as many others that have graced the nominations list, The Age of Shadows made virtually no noise and, unsurprisingly, was not nominated for the 2017 Academy Awards.

At the time, the submission of Age of Shadows made no sense to me. But in early 2017, a government blacklist created by Korea’s former, impeached president Park Geun-hye was uncovered. Thousands of Korean artists and cultural figures were banned from receiving government support, and one of the most prominent figures on that blacklist was The Handmaiden director Park Chan-wook, thought to be too leftist and thus a threat to the government’s agenda.

Lack of homeland support also likely ruined Oscar chances for Okja, about a young girl’s rescue mission to save her fantastical animal friend from evil corporate hands, even though its director, Bong Joon-ho, arguably has the most commercial appeal Stateside and the cast includes Hollywood A-listers like Jake Gyllenhaal and Tilda Swinton. But after 93 percent of Korean theaters refused to show Bong’s animal-liberation thriller due to its same-day Netflix release, Okja was doomed. So instead, A Taxi Driver was submitted (another fine movie that didn’t move any needles).