The disqualification was made known to voters for the category via email based on the fact that , "an international film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (defined as over 40 minutes) produced outside the United States of America with a predominantly non-English dialogue track." and Lionheart has just under 12 minutes of dialogue in Igbo Language while the rest of the 95 minutes is in English.

Genevive Nnaji and Ava DuVernay took to twitter to call out the injustice stating that English was in fact the dominant language in the country.