Foreign Language Film Submissions 2019

Based on true events, the movie tells the story of Queen Tomiris, a real historical hero. She, along with her female warriors, inspired the legends of the Amazon warriors.

In the Vietnamese drama The Third Wife, 14-year-old May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My) becomes the youngest of three bonded mistresses of an old and wealthy landowner (Le Vu Long). Soon after her marriage, May learns that she can only gain status by proclaiming herself as a woman who can give birth to a son.

It all starts with a mix-up: Maryam, an ambitious young doctor who works in a hospital in a small town in Saudi Arabia – in itself a feat for a woman in that country – seeks permission to travel to Dubai in search of a better paying job. But instead of filling out the proper form, she comes across an application for local elections.

Stupid Young Heart is a Finnish film set in a working-class neighborhood with a growing multicultural population. The main characters are the skinny and carefree Lenni and the gorgeous and popular Kiira, both 15 years old.

In present-day Guatemala, the country is riveted on the trial of the officers who served with the military regime during the civil war. Ernesto (Armando Espitia) works as a forensic anthropologist, recovering the bones of people killed during Guatemala’s genocide, also known as the Mayan genocide, to locate, unearth, identify and create an inventory of the thousands of anonymous “disappeared” during the war.

Long before the world rediscovered the catastrophe that happened in Chernobyl in 1986 through the HBO miniseries created by Craig Mazin, a Cuban-Canadian coproduction selected for the international competition at the Sundance Film Festival last year, had shed some light on the worst nuclear accident in history and its heart-wrenching aftermath. Un traductor, which marked the directing debut of brothers Rodrigo and Sebastian Barriuso, tells the story of the Cuban program to treat the children that suffered the consequences of the disaster in Ukraine.

Eight Out of Ten is about murder, police corruption, violence against women, exploitation of the workers, marginalization of class, injustice in immigration, human rights, and drug trafficking. Eight Out of Ten is the ratio of murders that are never investigated in Mexico.

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.