Foreign Language Film Submissions 2019

After ending a fling with a student half her age, Maria, a 40-something law professor (an effervescent Chiara Mastroianni) suddenly confesses a long history of affairs to Richard (Benjamin Biolay), her husband of twenty years. Moving out of the family apartment, she settles in room 212 (the movie’s original French title) at a hotel just across the street in the Paris Montparnasse district.

“Being scared alone does not make you a whore,” says Aldó to Klára, when she is reprimanded by her aunt Ogi for hugging him. “I’m scared too.

A pickaxe digs into the rock - that’s the first sound we hear while the screen is still dark. Then, a woman washes dishes in a restaurant.

Truth and Justice (Tõde ja õigus) is an adaptation of a part of the classic Estonian novelist A. H.

The Anarchist Banker, a stylishly black and white film based on a 1922 short story by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, won the Persefone Award at the 75th Venice Film Festival in 2017. A labor of love for director Giulio Base, it took 35 years to bring it to the screen due to the difficulty of translating a philosophical and poetic project to cinematic form.

The Steed tells a poignant tale of a young boy who braves brutality, betrayal and the war in his relentless search of the horse he has been separated from during the aftermath of the Russian revolution. Love, family, and devotion are at the heart of this epic tale that unfolds against the vast majestic landscape of Mongolia.

Young Ahmed is a 2019 drama, directed by the gifted Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose intensely humane realist dramas have already twice earned them the Palme d’Or in Cannes. Yet in Young Ahmed, the brothers dare to take a controversial turn with a portrait of a radicalized Muslim teen.

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.