2016 Foreign Film Submissions

It was said that Tonio, the novel, simply couldn’t be turned into a feature film. The bestelling book by Dutch literary giant A.

Venezuelan director’s Lorenzo Vigas debut film, From Afar, is somewhat of a mystery thriller, but also much more. The film tells the story of a middle aged man, Armando (played by Chilean actor Alfredo Castro, seen in No and The Club), a wealthy but lonely man with a habit of luring young men to his home with the promise of money.

The dynamics concerning women in Arab culture are at the center of Sand Storm. The directorial debut from Israeli writer/director Elite Zexer follows a contemporary Arab-speaking family living in a village of Southern Israel.

In a time when Colombia appears close to the end of the decades-long conflict between its government and leftist guerrillas, Colombian director José Luis Rugeles has made Alias Maria, a drama that shows the role of child soldiers and their exploitation in that civil war.  The film is the story of Maria (Karen Torres), a 13-year old child guerrilla soldier.

In the latest film by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn the story begins as celebrated Argentine expatriate writer Daniel Mantovani (Oscar Martinez) receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his acceptance speech, in front of the king and queen of Sweden, he expresses his scorn for such a recognition which he considers the end of his career, since from now on he will be forever regarded as a “Nobel Prize Winner”, which will generate incredible expectations for his future works.

I Am Not Madame Bovary, directed by critically acclaimed filmmaker Feng Xiaogang and starring Fan Bingbing, is a rare satire of China’s bureaucracy in the current landscape of Chinese cinema. The term “Madame Bovary” originates from a famous fictional character “Pan Jinlian” in the 17th-century Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei).

Director David Schurmman had a very unusual upbringing: born in Brazil, he graduated college in New Zealand and, between one landmark and the other, spent most of his life on a boat, crossing the Earth’s oceans with his family. Little Secret, his first feature film after a career in TV and documentaries, showcases this very special point of view and beyond: it is, in essence, the story of his family.

As Afterimage's credits start to roll, the inevitable becomes a reality: this is the last time we will see Andrzej Wajda's name on a new film. His final cinematic outing could not be a more beautiful and courageous artistic statement, though, which makes it a little more bearable.

Golden Globe winner Pedro Almodóvar returns to explore the theme of women in Julieta, his 20th feature film. But this time the way in which the Spanish director faces his subject is quite a departure from his earlier work.

In The Ardennes Brothers Dave and Kenneth are reunited on Kenneth’s release, after four years in prison following a failed home invasion. While Kenneth is anxious to dive headfirst into the drug-centered existence that ensnared him in the first place, both Dave and Kenneth’s former girlfriend Sylvie have adopted clean lifestyles.