78th Golden Globe Awards

This is the film that made it against Covid, earning $500 million on worldwide screens to become the highest-grossing film of 2020.  The Eight Hundred is already a winner as it helped to keep open some of the cinemas around the entire world.

Under the Open Sky follows the journey of Madao Mikami, released after serving thirteen years in prison for murder. Sporting an unfashionable rice bowl haircut, the sunken cheeked, hollowed eyed ex-felon marches out of prison into the snowy, cold world, swearing to leave his yakuza life behind and start a new life.

The original title of Twilight’s Kiss is Suk Suk (Chinese Title叔. 叔).

Buladó.

Filmed in Mumbai, India, Harami, written and directed by Shyam Madiraju, tells the story of a sixteen-year-old orphan, Pachpan (played by Rizwan Shaikh), a skilled pickpocket who is part of a gang of orphans – identified only by a number – under the strict rules of the cruel and merciless Sagar Bhai (Emraan Hashmi). One day, Pachpan steals a wallet loaded with money, and when curiosity brings him to the address listed on the ID in the wallet, he discovers the tragic truth: that his theft had driven his victim, a father of two, to commit suicide.

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.