2016 Foreign Film Submissions

Coming out of the 2016 Miami Film Festival, the 2016 Malaga Film Festival and the Rencontres Cinémas d’Amérique Latine, Toulouse with the audience awards, The Companion is the third feature by  Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud. Set in 1988 Cuba, as the government dispatched HIV patients to AIDS centers under military rule, the film narrates the story of Horacio Romero (played by Latin Grammy-winning singer Yotuel Romero, vocalist of the hip hop group Orishas), a former Olympic boxing champion involved in a doping scandal, and Daniel (Armando Miguel Gómez), a soldier infected by an African prostitute while on an internationalist mission and one most defiant patients at Los Cocos AIDS Center.

With a running time of almost four hours, Lav Diaz’s The Woman Who Left, which won the Golden Lion at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, is one of his shortest films. The acclaimed director’s other award-winning films are epic in length.

Swedish writer Fredrik Backman initially had trouble selling the manuscript for his debut novel, A Man Called Ove, about an elderly curmudgeon fighting his loneliness through an obsession with order in his neighborhood. That difficulty dissipated after the publication of the book in 2012.

There’s an emotionally powerful scene toward the end of Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa in which Jaclyn Jose – who won the 2016 Cannes Film Festival best actress award for this role – quietly, wordlessly, weeps. Movingly conveying emotions only through her eyes, Jose sums up what her titular character has gone through in Mendoza’s Palme d’Or-nominated film.

At a time when Hollywood is trying  hard (with different degrees of success) to represent minorities and handicapped people on the screen in a positive light, mainly as supporting characters, the Hungarian writer-director Atilla Till does precisely the opposite. He makes wheelchair- bound and otherwise handicapped people hired assassins and empowered anti-heroes.

A young detective in the Northern Russian region of Yakutia is dealing with a seemingly simple murder case.  The investigation becomes a dangerous journey into the world of illegal mining and gold trafficking in which life has no value.

Who shot Lauri, a well-liked teacher with no known enemies in his local community? As he now lays comatose at home, his mother Elsa (Tiina Maelberg, a respected stage and TV actress making her film debut) acts as a devoted caregiver with infinite patience and resilience. A middle aged woman visibly stuck in a loveless marriage, the permanent quiet tension on her face only occasionally betrays hidden depths of lifelong frustration, unhappiness and resentment.

“As a filmmaker raised in Nagorno-Karabakh I have listened to stories of hardships endured by my family and villagers, and of their struggles into dealing with such a devastating inter-ethnic conflict. ” So says Jivan Avetisyan, a prolific 35 year-old Armenian director with a solid documentary background, who was born in this mountainous landlocked separatist region in the Southwestern tip of Armenia bordering with Azerbaijan and totaling a mere 4400 square km.

Greeks have always had a turbulent history; but from the time of gods and heroes, they have also counted on the power of Eros in order to overcome their trials, to fight and to free themselves. Christopher Papakaliatis’ second feature, Worlds Apart, taps into that fact.

The famous Russian and international theater director Kirill Serebrennikov who also regularly forays into directing films, is no stranger to the Golden Globes. His film Playing the Victim (2006), a contemporary Russian take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet ,was in competition for the best film in the Foreign Language category.