Foreign Language Film Submissions 2018

While watching Namme, a new film from Georgia submitted for Golden Globe consideration, one has to understand that it did not come out of anywhere. Georgian cinema has a long and illustrious tradition based on a distinctive and centuries-long literary, artistic and theater culture.

Unknown Soldier is a Finnish war drama based on the bestselling classic novel by Väinö Linna. With a budget of $8 million, the film became the most expensive film ever made in Finland or in the Finnish language.

After his Oscar-winning Holocaust tragedy, Son of Saul, Hungarian director László Nemes goes back to his country to tell a story of intrigue and terror, a mystery drama about the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Sunset László Nemes explores his own cultural heritage through the tale of Írisz Leiter (Juli Jakab) a mysterious woman, with enormous eyes, lost in Budapest on the eve of World War I.

When Pawel Pawlikowski’s previous film, Ida, won the Oscar for best foreign language film back in 2015, the Warsaw-born formerly British-based director, paid tribute to his parents. “They’re not among the living,” he managed to sputter out while accepting the award, “but they’re totally inside this film.

To paraphrase the Bible, "no man is a prophet in his own land. " These words could easily apply to the fate of the now world-famous, late Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters has caught much attention after being awarded the Palm d’Or in Cannes this year. After its Japanese release in June, the film has gone on to become the biggest box office among his films with a current domestic box office total of $54 million.

The Man Who Surprised Everyone is co-directed and co-scripted by husband and wife team Aleksey Chupov and Natalya Merkulova (Intimate Places, About Love, Only for Adults, Gogol, Beginning).  The directors define the film as a “parable about the resistance of the ordinary Russian man to death” and explain that it is “based on the personal memories of director Natalya Merkulova, her Siberian childhood, the village in which she grew up, the people who surrounded her, and the legends that were told in those places”.

Two friends decide to loot Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and steal some of the country’s most important cultural artifacts. This is the plot of Museo, a Mexican production competing for the 2019 Golden Globe in the Foreign Language category.

With the support of her loving father, Lara, (Victor Polster) a transgender teenager, pursues her dream of becoming a professional ballerina. Assigned male at birth, Lara has to overcome more than blistered, bloody feet to realize her dream, and leads a painful trajectory, full of frustrations, as she struggles to come to terms with her more complex journey to womanhood.

Night Accident, a story of unlikely love by Temirbek Birnazarov, was awarded the Grand Prix at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival for “its simple, yet immersive story of a man who has been tortured by life’s travails.  The accident gives him a rich opportunity to lighten his being and distracts him from an even darker journey, and he seizes it with both hands,” summed up the jury.