78TH Foreign Language Film Submissions

Set during the Irish potato famine in 1845, Arracht, which means monster in the Irish language, is a dark yet beautiful movie from writer/director Tom Sullivan. In his story, brutal colonization by English overlords runs side by side with the deadly blight that wiped out the lumper potato on which the Irish peasantry had become so dependent.

The setting of Forest Giant is a very Finnish one. Finland is a country full of forests and lakes which has survived largely because of its wood factories.

La Maca: it is the largest prison in the Ivory Coast in West Africa, where more than five thousand inmates live by their own rules in a crowded hellhole. Aging and ailing Blackbeard (Steven Tientcheu, seen in Ladj Li’s Les Misérables), reigns as its ruthless boss while challenged by rival pretenders eager to take his throne.

The Swedish custody drama was filmed in snowy Northern Sweden above the polar circle and in the sunny hills and lava beaches of Tenerife. The change of physical location brings a dramatic contrast in the film.

Eeb Allay Ooo! is a political satire addressing the heavy political atmosphere in New Delhi, the capital of India. Director Prateek Vats’s daring and hilarious film exposes the political flaws of the system as seen through the innocent eyes of a young boy who is hired to get rid of the monkeys which populate the official governmental buildings.

On the Sicilian island of Favignana, in the late 1960s, Lucia (Marta Castiglia) is left behind by her parents who moved to France in search of work. She stays with her grandmother (Lucia Sardo), the “general”, a tough lady who forcefully tries to protect Lucia from the macho world around them.

French screen legend Catherine Deneuve plays Fabienne, an aging renowned actress, in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth (La vérité), his follow-up to the 2019 Palme d’or winner and Golden Globes nominee Shoplifters.   The film explores the complicated relationship between Fabienne and her visiting daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), who resents the rose-colored version of the past presented in her mother’s just-published memoirs.

The Crying Steppe is a film based on real events that happened in the early years of the Soviet communist regime, when artificially imposed hunger on the native population of Kazakhstan during the 1920s and 1930s cost the lives of 8. 5 million people – 70% of native Kazakhs.

This Bangladeshi movie from director Rubaiyat Hossain is the story of a group of garment workers who work in tyrannical conditions to produce cheap clothing for westerners. Wages are withheld, sexism, violence and abuse are the norm.

A remake of the popular 2013 South Korean film of the same name Miracle in Cell No. 7 is directed by Mehmet Ada Oztekin.