79TH Non-English Language Film Submissions

Bahattar Hoorain (72 Virgins), helmed by director Sanjay Puran Singh Chauhan, is a dark comedy. At an extremist training facility, Bilal and Hakim are instructed that if they give their lives in the name of Allah, they will be rewarded with bahattar hoorain (72 beautiful virgins) in heaven.

Ghosting Gloria (Muerto con Gloria) is a comedy-romance-and-a-little-bit-of-horror take on a different kind of love story between Gloria, a 30-year-old bookstore employee, and Dante, a ghost. Directed by Mauro Sarser and Marcela Matta, who is also the producer, the film features Stefania Tortorella as Gloria, a single employee from Montevideo, Uruguay who works at a local bookstore.

In When Pomegranates Howl, the second feature film from Iranian-Australian Granaz Moussavi, the film’s main character, Hewad (portrayed by Arafat Faiz), is forced to become the breadwinner in the family at the age of nine on the death of his father. Hewad sells trinkets, snacks, and pomegranates in a heavy wooden cart in the harsh streets of Kabul.

“For me, it’s very important to make a film about life,” François Ozon said in a video interview with Les Cinémas Pathé Gaumont. This may seem like an oxymoron, knowing that his latest film, Everything Went Fine, is about euthanasia.

It’s in his eyes. Jaakko’s eyes are the window to feelings like love, sorrow, frustration, fear, and doubt.

Through its simplicity, India’s Pebbles makes more impact than any loud big-budget film with its strong messages of resilience, survival, female emotional strength, appreciation of the simple joys in grinding poverty and the maturity of children. The debut feature film of writer-director P.

Filmed in Russia, Unwanted is the directorial debut of Russian female director Lena Lanskih. This 109-minute movie is the story of a teenage girl named Vika, who becomes an adolescent mother at the age of fourteen and is forced to hide the fact from the rest of the world.

Souad follows the life of a 19-year-old teenager, Souad (portrayed by Bassant Ahmed), in Zagazig, a small city on the Nile Delta in Egypt. She leads a double life as she remains conservative with her family but projects a completely different life on social media as she engages in several secret virtual relationships with men like Ahmed (Hussein Ghanem).

Identifying Features (Sin Señas Particulares), a film shot mostly by women filmmakers, is about a mother, Magdalena (portrayed by Mercedes Hernandez), who embarks on a journey in search of her son who disappeared en route to the U. S.

In the privacy of a car – a moving room, if one looks at it from a different point of view – a man and a woman share silences in a circular open road. Kafuku, the passenger, is a theater actor and director; Misaki, the driver, is a young woman provided by the producers of a theater festival in Hiroshima.