Foreign Cinema

The Flower of Aleppo bravely tackles Tunisia's most complicated and painful problem since the start of the Arab spring. Tunisian youth outnumber every other nationality among the foreign fighters who have joined the "jihad" in the Syrian civil war.

Clash, which opened the Un Certain Regard section at the 69th annual Cannes Film Festival this year, positions the viewer on the inside of an Egyptian police riot van in 2013, when Egypt's first freely elected president, Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi, was overthrown by the military after a divisive year in power. The country later outlawed the group, branding it a terrorist organization.

Dawn or Ausma, the visually powerful monochrome tragicomedy from Latvian director-screenwriter Laila Pakalnina, is inspired by the mythical propaganda story of Pavel Trofimovich Morozov, the 13-year-old boy who denounced his father to the authorities as an anti-Soviet and was ultimately murdered by his own family. More popularly known as Pavlik, the teenager has been praised by the Soviet government as a political martyr.

Redha (Beautiful Pain), is the first Malaysian film to tackle autism. In her feature directing debut, Tunku Mona Riza delivers a quiet, compassionate look at the condition which afflicts one in 160 children, according to the World Health Organization.

Coming out of the 2016 Miami Film Festival, the 2016 Malaga Film Festival and the Rencontres Cinémas d’Amérique Latine, Toulouse with the audience awards, The Companion is the third feature by  Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud. Set in 1988 Cuba, as the government dispatched HIV patients to AIDS centers under military rule, the film narrates the story of Horacio Romero (played by Latin Grammy-winning singer Yotuel Romero, vocalist of the hip hop group Orishas), a former Olympic boxing champion involved in a doping scandal, and Daniel (Armando Miguel Gómez), a soldier infected by an African prostitute while on an internationalist mission and one most defiant patients at Los Cocos AIDS Center.

With a running time of almost four hours, Lav Diaz’s The Woman Who Left, which won the Golden Lion at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, is one of his shortest films. The acclaimed director’s other award-winning films are epic in length.

Swedish writer Fredrik Backman initially had trouble selling the manuscript for his debut novel, A Man Called Ove, about an elderly curmudgeon fighting his loneliness through an obsession with order in his neighborhood. That difficulty dissipated after the publication of the book in 2012.

There’s an emotionally powerful scene toward the end of Brillante Mendoza’s Ma’ Rosa in which Jaclyn Jose – who won the 2016 Cannes Film Festival best actress award for this role – quietly, wordlessly, weeps. Movingly conveying emotions only through her eyes, Jose sums up what her titular character has gone through in Mendoza’s Palme d’Or-nominated film.

At a time when Hollywood is trying  hard (with different degrees of success) to represent minorities and handicapped people on the screen in a positive light, mainly as supporting characters, the Hungarian writer-director Atilla Till does precisely the opposite. He makes wheelchair- bound and otherwise handicapped people hired assassins and empowered anti-heroes.

A young detective in the Northern Russian region of Yakutia is dealing with a seemingly simple murder case.  The investigation becomes a dangerous journey into the world of illegal mining and gold trafficking in which life has no value.