ROME, Sept. 25 (Xinhua) -- Director Matteo Garrone's 2018 film Dogman is Italy's candidate for the Best Foreign Language Film of the Academy Awards, or the Oscars, the Italian film industry association (ANICA) announced Tuesday.

The Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film will be announced on Jan. 19 and the awards ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on Feb. 24 next year, the ANICA said.

"We share with Matteo Garrone the satisfaction and the joy of representing Italy in the first step towards the competition for the Academy Awards," tweeted RAI Cinema, the film division of the Italian public broadcaster which is one of the producers of the movie.

Based on a true crime story from the 1980s, Dogman is about a gentle and hardworking dog-groomer who hatches a plan to reassert his dignity after he is repeatedly abused by a vicious former boxer who terrorizes the neighborhood.

Dogman was nominated for the top prize at Cannes, the Palme d'Or, while star Marcello Fonte won the Best Actor award in May this year. The movie also garnered a Palme Dog for its canine cast.

Born in Rome in 1968, Garrone won Best Director at the European Film Awards and at the David di Donatello Awards (Italy's Oscars) for his 2008 movie Gomorrah, which is about the lives of young thugs in Camorra mafia-controlled Naples and which is based on a book by anti-mafia journalist Roberto Saviano.

His film Reality won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2012.