79TH Non-English Language Film Submissions

Brighton 4th is the latest offering from Georgian filmmaker Levan Koguashvili. It’s a bitter-sweet tale of parental devotion and the blood, sweat, and tears that a father-son relationship can entail.

“Today mom will start writing down everything she remembers. Today I will try to remember how you went from being my baby to being Luana, my princess”, begins the book “I´m girl, I´m princess”, written by Gabriella Mansilla, about her daughter, the first trans girl in the world to receive her ID, according to her gender self-perception through the Gender Identity Law.

Art isn’t created in a vacuum. Much of it springs directly from stresses and inspirations which surround us all.

Georgian actor and director Giorgi Megrelishvili is nothing if not ambitious. When he couldn’t secure financing for a contemporary version of Hamlet in 2017, in which he also played the lead, he shot it on mobile phones.

Kiều, directed by Mai Thu Huyền, blends action and romance alongside lushly staged melodrama in a manner, which summons forth feelings one might most readily associate with the grand, sweeping, foretold fates of an epic poem. That’s no surprise, given that the movie is inspired by a selected excerpt from poet Nguyễn Du’s 3,254-verse “luc bát” meter classic 19th century text “The Tale of Kiều,” an enduring and widely translated piece of early feminism, and one of the most famous Vietnamese literary works of all-time.

In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of films about women made by women. Yuni, Indonesia’s frontrunner this year belongs to this generation.

A family drama that explores the long shadow that one man’s bipolar disorder casts over his loved ones, Belgium-born filmmaker Joachim Lafosse’s The Restless enjoyed its world premiere in competition at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival. Damien Bonnard – who after a decade’s worth of screen credits burst onto the international film scene playing a conflicted police officer in Ladj Ly’s Golden Globe-nominated Les Misérables – here portrays Damien, a bipolar but loving father and successful artist who feels his best and most creative work comes when he is not taking his prescribed medication.

The end of the 90s, a party in a big Altbau apartment in Moscow. It is full of intellectuals who are enjoying not only food and drinks but also academic parlor games.

One of the most in-demand young Russian actors at the moment opened up to me over Zoom about his challenges of working on his latest role as the titular Captain Volkonogov in the 2021 Russian drama film directed by Natalya Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov. This stylish, retro utopian thriller tells the redemption story of a Stalin-era enforcement agent and was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at this year’s 78th Venice International Film Festival.

To escape the toxic pollution, streets overflowing with garbage, constant power outages and social unrest of Beirut, the Badri family has moved to an idyllic quiet retreat in the mountains above the city. There, Walid (Saleh Bakri) and Soraya (Nadine Labaki, director of the Golden Globe-nominated Capernaum), their two girls and the grandmother enjoy an isolated eco-conscious and self-sufficient lifestyle.