78TH Foreign Language Film Submissions

From acclaimed Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska comes the modern tale of a quiet but charismatic Ukrainian masseur called Zhenia (Alec Utgoff).  He enters the film emerging from the dept of a forest at night carrying a massage table over his shoulder and a small backpack.

Just Like That (Aise Hee) by single-named director Kislay, delves into how women are put into boxes – that they are homemakers and wives and nothing else – while men are the superior race and can get away with anything without embarrassment. The film follows the life of Mrs.

Deepa Mehta has adapted Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 coming-of-age novel Funny Boy, a story which, seen through the eyes of a young Sri Lankan boy named Arjie, examines the backdrop of that country’s 26-year-long Civil War between the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic factions. In the film – which was shot on location in the former capital of Colombo – Mehta, who collaborated on the script with Selvadurai, has translated the book’s six vignettes to a more fluid narrative that uses our protagonist as the witness not only to the tensions of the country’s cultural clash but to his own sexual awakening.

Jimmy Keyrouz was finishing his master’s in film directing at Columbia University in 2014 when he heard in the news that ISIS had banned music in its Syrian territories. So, he decided to make his thesis film about the subject and thus was born his short film Nocturne in Black, which ended up sweeping numerous awards including Gold for Best Narrative at the Student Academy Awards, the Bafta Student Film Award for Live Action, and a student award at the Directors Guild of America.

Impetigore is a movie from Indonesia that slowly sucks you into the ancient and spirited culture of that mystical part of the world. Ancient Javanese language is spoken by old characters as the story becomes slowly more mysterious and soon you realize that you are taking a slow descent into terror as tension builds and never lets up.

Leap is a sports drama directed by Peter Ho-Sun Chan and starring Gong Li and Huang Bo. It has been selected as China’s official entry in this year's International Oscar race.

Iranian director Majid Majidi’s Sun Children is dedicated to “the 152 million children forced into child labor and those who fight for their rights. ”  In the bustling city of Tehran, local crime boss Hashem (Ali Nasirian) has commissioned the 12-year old Ali (Roohollah Zamani) to dig a tunnel under the Sun School, where a hidden ‘treasure’ is to be found under the cemetery.

After exposing the abuse of a rape victim by police officers in her 2017 film, Beauty and the Dogs, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania turns her attention to another kind of abuse of the powerless by the powerful in her latest movie, The Man Who Sold His Skin. The protagonist of the film is Sam, a young Syrian from Raqqa, who’s deeply in love with his sweetheart, Abeer.

Pilate allows us to witness a relationship between mother and daughter and the challenges that arise when love is not accompanied by understanding. It is an adaptation of the novel by Magda Szabó – published in English under the name of Iza’s Ballad – and is director Linda Dombrovzsky’s first feature.

“Dealing with life is complicated, we are dissatisfied animals”, wrote Rafael Azcona, the great Spanish satirist, most celebrated by his collaborations with Spanish director Luis Garcia Berlanga (El Verdugo) and Italian director Marco Ferreri (El Pisíto) in his novel, The Europeans, published in 1960. It was precisely Berlanga who several times said he wanted to direct the film.