foreign films

How would we judge a middle-aged woman who has a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old stepson? This is the question that director May el-Toukhy and her co-writer Maren Louise Kaehne force us to face in Queen of Hearts. Anne (Trine Dyrholm) is an attorney who advocates for children victims of abuse.

It’s 1897 in Paris and young dramatist Edmond Rostand (seductively energetic newcomer Thomas Solivérès) is a struggling wordsmith plagued with anxieties, unable to find the inspiration for his next work. In desperation, he offers the great stage star of the Belle Epoque, Constant Coquelin (Olivier Gourmet, a Dardenne brother regular), a new play, a heroic comedy, in verse.

“It took me a long time to even have the confidence to tell my own stories,” says Lulu Wang, writer-director of The Farewell. As a female filmmaker and a minority, Wang hurdled challenges before she got to make her feature-length debut, 2014’s Posthumous, and The Farewell, which has been winning acclaim since it premiered in the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Incitement is a historical thriller by Israeli director Yaron Zilberman. It was shown at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival in the World Cinema competition where its screening had to be interrupted briefly due to a security threat.

 “There is no sexuality in Georgian dance,” says Aleko (Kakha Goidze), teacher of a touring dancing company. That doesn’t sit well with Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) a young dancer who has been training from an early age at the National Georgian Ensemble.

Saving Leningrad is a Russian war film about a part of history that is not known to many Westerners. It tells the harrowing tale of peasants trying to survive when their city of Leningrad is besieged during WWII.

The power of cinematic resistance should not be underestimated. This is one of the messages conveyed by Lav Diaz’s latest, the 4.

After successfully collaborating on 2015’s Golden Globe-nominated The Fencer, director Klaus Härö.

Strangers of Patience was screened as part of the HFPA’s Foreign Language Film Series this year and accepted for Golden Globe consideration in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Andrey (Konstantin Lavronenko) is a well-known artist-photographer who lives alone in a big city with his Labrador Charley.

German writer/director Nora Fingscheidt’s feature debut System Crasher ventures into the little talked-about world of mental health. The nine-year-old Benni (Helena Zengel) suffers from preverbal trauma and abuse and is ushered from institution to institution in the absence of parental care.