78TH Foreign Language Film Submissions

When the director of True Mothers, Naomi Kawase, read the book Asa ga Kuru/ 朝が来るby Mizuki Tsujimura, she felt something within her say “this is a story meant for me”. True Mothers is a story about a young couple, Satoko and Kiyokazu.

Meet Sayuri (Yoshiko Sengen), a winsome and bright-eyed part-time waitress working at a small Tokyo coffee-shop, “Extra”. She has a secret.

Carlos Sorin’s Notes for My Son details in almost documentary fashion the last days of a terminal cancer patient who has been told that her treatments are no longer effective. Unlike recent Hollywood movies on the subject, it does not sugarcoat the experience but also it keeps the viewer from turning away thanks to the remarkable performance of Valeria Bertuccelli who plays the victim, Maria Valdez.

The fable of “La Llorona” – the weeping woman – of a mother who drowns her children after her husband betrays her, has often ignited the imagination of artists, and Jayro Bustamante is no exception. But in the version of this Guatemalan director in his eponymous film, the legend takes on a new dimension.

Edoardo Ponti once again directs his mother – none other than Sophia Loren – in the Netflix feature film The Life Ahead, based on French novelist Romain Gary's novel, and adapted for the screen by Ponti with Italian screenwriter Ugo Chiti. Set in present-day Bari, Italy, the movie tells the story of Madame Rosa (Loren), a tough-as-nails lady who takes in young refugees from Africa as foster children.

The artistic and political lives of Vaclav Havel, leader of the Velvet Revolution, are skillfully interwoven in this elegant biopic by Czech director Slávek Horák. Spanning three decades, beginning with the 1968 Prague Spring, the viewer sees how Havel is transformed by politics, yet never loses the playwrights’ perspective as he melds political action and police repression into dramaturgy and then back to politics.

 A drama with doses of humor, Guerrero Dos: Tuloy ang Laban (The Fight Continues) chronicles the struggles of a mother and her young son, Miguel (Julio Caesar Sabenorio). When Miguel’s brother, Ramon, falls into a coma after a boxing match, mother and son must soldier on, keeping vigil in the hospital while coping with their daily struggles.

Derek Tsang's hard-hitting drama Better Days is a gripping impressive melodrama, focused on the bullying of students in a Chinese high school. Chen Nian (Zhou Dongyu) is among the top students in her year despite coming from an impoverished background.

How about taking a road trip from Italy to the countries where Soviet rule is still in place? In 1989, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that's what three friends from the city of Cesena – Pago, Rice and Bibi (played by Lodo Guenzi, Jacopo Costantini and Matteo Gatta) – decide to do, in search of fun and adventure. They get more than they bargained for.

The Russian film Text is a fast-paced screen adaptation of Dmitry Glukhovsky’s bestselling novel of the same name. The main character, 27-year-old Ilya Goryunov, was falsely imprisoned for seven years based on drug trafficking charges.