78th Golden Globe Awards

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut eludes definitive characterizations. For each thought or feeling that may be generated by it, there will be another to counteract it.

Minari is an American production acted in Korean and as such qualifies for the Golden Globes’ Foreign Language category. It is a semi-autobiographical story written by director Lee Isaac Chung, who grew up in a small farm in Arkansas and it follows very closely the experiences of  a small Korean family in that state in the 1980s.

Alena Yiv and Shira Hass play mother and daughter in this intimate drama from Israel that explores the psychological effects of a teenager as she comes to terms with her impending death. For her mother, a youthful 35-year-old still trying to stay sexually relevant, the struggle contains a bitter irony: ironic that at her work at a hospital her job is to save people; while at home, she proves powerless to protect her daughter.

When Hany Abu Assad’s.

Star-director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) chose a cult novel for his newest film. He based Forgotten We’ll Be on Hector Abad Faciolince's book of the same title, which tells the true story of Héctor Abad Gómez, a prominent doctor and human rights activist in the polarized, violent Medellin of the 1970s.

Singaporean director Anthony Chen’s second film, Wet Season, deals with the forbidden albeit short-lived love affair between Ling (Yeo Yann Yann), a Malaysian teacher in her late 30s, and her teenage student Wei Lun (Koh Jia Ler) amidst the former’s strained marriage and the latter’s struggle to belong. The story unfolds quietly, all along in synchrony with the heroine’s emotional undertones while she goes through painful fertility treatments, takes care of her disabled father-in-law, and increasingly loses connection to her indifferent husband.

The title itself – in German, Was Wir Wollten – is an indication of unfulfilled wishes, in this case the wish for a child. Alice and Niklas, two successful people from Vienna who are in their early 40s, face fertility issues, and after another unsuccessful round of in vitro, they decide to forget about the stresses of getting pregnant and head to Sardinia for what they hope will be a relaxing vacation that will distract them from their emotional wounds.

Hope is buoyed by a superlative performance by Andrea Braeim Hovig, who not surprisingly has won several acting awards this year. There are so many unexpected twists and turns in the telling of the story, all of them authentic and none less than moving, that it comes as a surprise to learn that this is a true story.

In 1995, one of the worst massacres of the Balkan war happened during what was already one of the most violent periods of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. 8,372 innocent civilians were murdered in the Bosnian town of Srebenica by the Bosnian Serb army under the command of General Ratko Mladic, a particularly brutal commander who now serves a life sentence after being convicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the international Criminal Court in The Hague.

Zaza Urushadze, known for the Golden Globe nominated  Tangerines (2013), passed away one year ago in his hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia. He was 54 and Anton is his posthumously released farewell movie.