foreign films

Christos Nikou’s debut film Apples is definitely quirky.  A man suffering from total amnesia, struggles to reinvent himself in a borderline surrealistic, dreamlike  world, yet it is also astutely a humanistic story.

A Kosovan immigrant, Xhafer, living in Germany, believes he’s a victim of xenophobia, although it may be his own paranoia spiraling out of control. When Xhafer finds a dead rat hanging from the gate in front of his home, he immediately suspects that his racist colleagues could be behind it.

Working Girls, a film by Frédéric Fonteyne, explores the lives of three prostitutes, Axelle, Conso and Dominic, who work in a brothel just over the Belgian border. In the opening scene during a torrential downpour, the audience is immediately guessing who these three women are burying.

Black Milk is director-writer-actress Uisenma Borchu’s second film. Born in Mongolia in 1984, Borchu moved to Germany when she was four.

In South Africa the word “moffie” is a homophobic term for homosexual. It is also the title of a fine film by Oliver Hermanus.

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.