foreign films

It was supposed to be a happy and long overdue family gathering to celebrate Easter Sunday in a Beirut apartment. But the reunion soon takes a turn for the worse in Heaven Without People, the feature film debut of Lebanese theater director Lucian Bourjeily.

We see a boy – is it really a boy? – walking towards a mansion. We hear a male voice narrating his thoughts: “I am a born thief”.

A Son of Man, directed by Luis Felipe Fernández-Salvador and Pablo Agüero, is a film shot in the jungles of Ecuador. It follows Pipe, a circumspect American teenager from the rich suburbs of Minneapolis who reluctantly joins his mysterious father in Ecuador, his father’s home country, where they embark on a treasure hunt for Incan gold.

Even though there’s no doubt that technology has improved the world when it comes to communications and protection, many are concerned of the effects that the potential abuse of that technology and its effects on the privacy of regular citizens. Surveillance is one of those ramifications which anybody can take advantage of with the right equipment, making the unsuspecting target a prey.

Taller than most professional basketball players, with a patrician look that fits his long name and crazy scientist hair, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has a hard-to-ignore physical presence. His 2007 film, The Lives of Others, a harrowing tale about an East German Stasi agent who becomes obsessed with the couple he’s spying on, began its march towards the Academy Award with a Golden Globe nomination that year.

Woman at War is a comedy, thriller, and drama from director Benedikt Erlingsson which tells of a middle-aged Reykjavik choir conductor, Halla, who is also a secret eco-warrior who sabotages her country’s electricity grid to save the Icelandic countryside from industrial pollution with only a bow and arrow. Halla, a 50-year-old independent woman (portrayed by Halldora Geirharosdottir), leads a double life as a passionate environmental activist.

Take It or Leave It, which was written and directed by Liina Trikina-Vanhatalo, is about the ruggedly handsome Erik (portrayed by Reimo Sagor), a 30-year-old construction worker who is drifting through life. Born in Estonia, Erik works long hours in a Finnish construction site and by night, glowers over his pint at the girls who try and involve him in their good times.

At the most recent Luxor Film Festival, an annual showplace of African films, a specific documentary was one of the most talked-about subjects among filmmakers and audience. It told the stories of young African women who became pregnant without being married, and as a form of severe punishment were banned to an island without a chance of returning to their villages and families.

The Wedding Ring or Zin’naariya is a Nigerian drama-romance film written and directed by Rahmatou Keita, a Nigerian journalist, writer and film director whose career began in 1990. It is about Tiyaa, a young woman who is a member of an aristocratic family and who returns to her home for the winter holidays in the Sultanate of Damagaran in Niger Republic, after finishing college abroad.

Based loosely on a real-life incident, The Journey tells a spare and streamlined story that exists at the intersection of the political and the personal. Co-written and directed by Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji, who lost a close cousin and many other family members in the protracted and bloody Iran-Iraq War, the movie is a psychological drama that examines the issues of extremism and sectarian violence.