News

Anyone looking back into the history of the moving picture would find a long list of films about how women live, think, feel, love, and hate, directed and written by men. For filmmaker Jane Campion, diving deep into the world of pure masculinity in The Power of the Dog – in the Wild West, of all places – was an exercise in subtlety and creativity that balances the narrative.

This moment, and this film, may have been inevitable for Ruth Negga. "I wanted to be an actor since I saw David Bowie walking down a set of stairs in (the 80s fantasy film) Labyrinth," she says.

2021’s Playground is an important film by talented Belgian writer-director Laura Wandel and marks her first feature-length movie. From the first shot of the film, viewers are thrown headlong into the deep end of the painful issue of bullying in elementary schools.

Kaitlyn Dever moved to Los Angeles from Dallas with her family in 2011, soon after being cast in the television crime series Justified. She was 13.

Amira is a lively and creative teen conceived via artificial insemination from a father who is detained in an Israeli prison. Immensely proud of her father, Amira lives with the hope of meeting the man, spending her time photoshopping him into her arms and her mother’s arms in the pictures she takes with her professional camera.

With screenings at 160 film festivals worldwide and 23 awards wins already, Suzannah Mirghani, the filmmaker behind the short film Al-Sit, has catapulted onto the world stage of cinema. As she steps into the spotlight, Mirghani is bringing with her a team of actors and crewmembers from her home country of Sudan and potentially heralding a new dawn for Sudanese film.

South Korea’s political action thriller Escape from Mogadishu is set in Somalia during the 1991 Somali civil war. Two South Korean diplomats, played by Han Shin-sung (Kim Yoon-seok) and Kang Dae-jin (Zo In-sung), who had been sent to the region in 1987, prepare to evacuate their embassy along with their employees, gathering family members as they make a desperate attempt to flee the country to safety.

Director-writer Pedro Almodóvar tackles the nightmare of every mother – to have their newborn babies switched at the maternity ward in his latest Spanish drama. Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas) deals with the trauma and complications when the switch happens not only with the women involved but also with the people close to them.

Recently, Bangladesh has surfaced as a new player in global cinema with a prevalent theme: The emergence of women in the country’s patriarchal society and the demand for equity. Rubaiyat Hossein’s Made in Bangladesh last year and Abdullah Mohammad Saad’s Rehana Maryam Noor (or just Rehana for international audiences) this year, share the plight of female characters positioned at the core of the story.

A group of refugees is dropped off at the Turkish-Bulgarian border by a rough smuggler. As they enter Europe under cover of darkness, the group is set upon by armed border guards.