foreign films

It would be a mistake to assume that Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain & Glory is the Spanish director’s literal autobiography. Rather, as he told HFPA journalists at its North American premiere in Toronto, it should be considered a work of “auto-fiction”: “Everything that is in the movie is very familiar to me, but it doesn't mean that I experienced everything.

Set in a small village in Maharashtra, India, in the 1990s, Baba is a heart-warming story of a deaf-mute couple, who adopt a hearing child and bring him up with the little money they have and lots of love. Their world is torn apart when the child’s well-to-do biological mother comes back to claim him.

They met 53 years ago, and we witnessed their swooning courtship on the big screen. Anne, a film producer, and Jean Louis, a race car driver, two parents raising their children alone following the death of their respective spouses, are the protagonists of Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman,  a story that has become mythical, and revolutionized the way we see love.

Single Slipper Size 7 is an Indian Tamil-language horror-thriller that premiered at the Singapore South Asian Film Festival. It was written, produced and directed by Radhakrishnan Parthiban, who also stars as the only character in the movie.

Set in 1770 Brittany, on the northern coast of France, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), written and directed by Céline Sciamma, is a delicate love story between two young women. Marianne is an artist who learned to paint from her father (in a time when women were not allowed into art schools).

Papicha is an Algerian word that refers to a funny, attractive, liberated young woman. And Nedjma surely fits the description.

An Afghan movie filmed in Kabul, the Shinwari Valley and Zarani, Afghanistan, and also in Munich, Germany, and Kos Island, Greece, among other locations, I Am You is an independent film based on the true story of Afghan refugees and their will to survive. The film was directed by Sonia Nassery Cole, written by Sean O'Byrne, and produced by Breadwinner Productions.

Making movies in Uruguay is not easy. After all, it's a market of just 3.

Argentina is living a time of uncertainty right now and no film could have connected better with that feeling than La odisea de los giles (which is being released in non-Spanish speaking countries as Heroic Losers). Ricardo Darin, -who is also a producer along with his son, Chino Darin, a big celebrity in Argentina and Spain as well- has the main role in the movie.

Based on true events, the film tells of how the French Catholic Church was challenged in court, changing the future of Catholicism in the country. By the Grace of God is about the child-abuse scandal which saw father Bernard Preynat of Lyon admit to molesting 70 boys over 30 years, following an online campaign by the now middle-aged abuse survivors.