foreign films

When news that Lucrecia Martel was trying to adapt Zama, the famous novel by Antonio di Benedetto, which was recently translated to English, more than 50 years after it was published in Argentina, the independent film world couldn't be more excited. After all, Martel was the one who created a new kind of Latin American cinema with her highly successful debut in 2001, La Cienaga, released in the US with its original Spanish name after winning awards at Sundance, Berlin, and Havana.

Austrian director Michael Haneke is an awards season and festival darling, having won two Golden Globes and having been nominated for two Oscars. He likes to shoot his films in France, which might explain his seven Palme d’Or and Grand Prix wins in Cannes.

Tulipani (tulips), subtitled Love, Honor and a Bicycle, directed by Mike van Diem from an original screenplay by Peter van Wijk, is a tragic story told with a sense of humor.  It starts in 1980 with the death of an old Italian woman in Montreal, Canada.

Bohdan Sláma’s film Ice Mother is a romantic drama about an old woman who finds love in the least expected circumstances during a cold winter. After her husband dies, Hana finds herself a 67-year-old widow who lives alone in a small town, with nothing else to wait for in her life but the weekly Sunday visit from her two argumentative and self-centered sons and their families.

Winner of the FIPRESCI award at the Thessalonik Film Festival as Best Drama, Amerika Square (Plateia Amerikis) reflects the timely issue of immigration, which has brought Europe to the brink of a humanitarian and political crisis. Directed by Yannis Sakaridis, it is the Greek entry for the Golden Globe in the Foreign Language category.

Filmed entirely in Panama, Oasis is director Jorge Ameer’s first ever film to be submitted for Golden Globe consideration. However, that doesn't mean the veteran director is new to the Hollywood scene.

Zhenya (Marina Spivak) and Boris (Alexey Rozin) can’t wait for their divorce to be finalized. They have already moved on, looking forward to their future lives, each with a new partner.

Joachim Trier’s Thelma is a supernatural horror film, but at its heart, the film is the coming-of-age story of a young girl, Thelma, who is from rural Norway and has a fundamentalist religious background. As she starts college in the capital, Oslo, she is highly uncomfortable in her own skin and has a hard time escaping the repressive ways of her religious parents.

What started as a banal insult escalates into civil unrest and riots in this edgy and unpredictable drama by Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Two men from different cultural backgrounds exchange harsh words about an inconsequential issue, which gets blown out of proportion and leads to dangerous consequences in a story that provides a profound look at the historical trauma that has shaped modern Lebanese society.

Directed by Sebastian Lelio (Gloria, Disobedience) A Fantastic Woman won the Best Screenwriting Award at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival and, since then, it has been receiving rave reviews and recognition around the world. A revolutionary film for an ultra-conservative country like Chile, the story revolves around Orlando (Francisco Reyes) a 57-year-old textile company executive with a marriage and family, and a love affair with Marina, a beautiful and much younger trans woman who works as a waitress in a restaurant.