foreign films

After making music professionally for ten years, Ghanaian artist Blitz Bazawule felt he needed to extend his creative voice beyond rhythms and notes. Impelled to show the world an African aesthetic he hadn’t seen represented before, this first time writer/director put his focus on creating The Burial Of Kojo – a piece of magical realism that he felt was attached to the spirit of his continent and that reminded him of the narratives told through his grandmother’s stories.

With his compatriots, Radu Jude, Cristian Mungiu and Crisit Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest, The Treasure) is one of the most prominent members of the Romanian New Wave, which have been instrumental in putting their country’s cinema on the world map over the last 15 years. His latest opus, The Whistlers, is a neo-noir thriller set mainly in La Gomera, the second smallest of Spain’s Canary Islands, where Cristi (Vlad Ivanov, Mungiu’s regular seen in Graduation and last year’s László Nemes Sunset), a corrupt Bucharest cop involved in drug money laundering, has been summoned by a local gangster.

Autumn 1990. A group of Western diplomats arrives in Albania to investigate human rights abuses by the communist regime still in power.

Based on true events, the movie tells the story of Queen Tomiris, a real historical hero. She, along with her female warriors, inspired the legends of the Amazon warriors.

In the Vietnamese drama The Third Wife, 14-year-old May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My) becomes the youngest of three bonded mistresses of an old and wealthy landowner (Le Vu Long). Soon after her marriage, May learns that she can only gain status by proclaiming herself as a woman who can give birth to a son.

It all starts with a mix-up: Maryam, an ambitious young doctor who works in a hospital in a small town in Saudi Arabia – in itself a feat for a woman in that country – seeks permission to travel to Dubai in search of a better paying job. But instead of filling out the proper form, she comes across an application for local elections.

Stupid Young Heart is a Finnish film set in a working-class neighborhood with a growing multicultural population. The main characters are the skinny and carefree Lenni and the gorgeous and popular Kiira, both 15 years old.

In present-day Guatemala, the country is riveted on the trial of the officers who served with the military regime during the civil war. Ernesto (Armando Espitia) works as a forensic anthropologist, recovering the bones of people killed during Guatemala’s genocide, also known as the Mayan genocide, to locate, unearth, identify and create an inventory of the thousands of anonymous “disappeared” during the war.

Long before the world rediscovered the catastrophe that happened in Chernobyl in 1986 through the HBO miniseries created by Craig Mazin, a Cuban-Canadian coproduction selected for the international competition at the Sundance Film Festival last year, had shed some light on the worst nuclear accident in history and its heart-wrenching aftermath. Un traductor, which marked the directing debut of brothers Rodrigo and Sebastian Barriuso, tells the story of the Cuban program to treat the children that suffered the consequences of the disaster in Ukraine.

Eight Out of Ten is about murder, police corruption, violence against women, exploitation of the workers, marginalization of class, injustice in immigration, human rights, and drug trafficking. Eight Out of Ten is the ratio of murders that are never investigated in Mexico.