Foreign Language Film Submissions 2020

Pilate allows us to witness a relationship between mother and daughter and the challenges that arise when love is not accompanied by understanding. It is an adaptation of the novel by Magda Szabó – published in English under the name of Iza’s Ballad – and is director Linda Dombrovzsky’s first feature.

“Dealing with life is complicated, we are dissatisfied animals”, wrote Rafael Azcona, the great Spanish satirist, most celebrated by his collaborations with Spanish director Luis Garcia Berlanga (El Verdugo) and Italian director Marco Ferreri (El Pisíto) in his novel, The Europeans, published in 1960. It was precisely Berlanga who several times said he wanted to direct the film.

Dressed in revealing halter tops and micro shorts, they love to twerk, shaking their bodies to suggestive choreographies copied from Tik Tok and YouTube. Meet the eponymous “cuties”.

Christos Nikou’s debut film Apples is definitely quirky.  A man suffering from total amnesia, struggles to reinvent himself in a borderline surrealistic, dreamlike  world, yet it is also astutely a humanistic story.

A Kosovan immigrant, Xhafer, living in Germany, believes he’s a victim of xenophobia, although it may be his own paranoia spiraling out of control. When Xhafer finds a dead rat hanging from the gate in front of his home, he immediately suspects that his racist colleagues could be behind it.

Working Girls, a film by Frédéric Fonteyne, explores the lives of three prostitutes, Axelle, Conso and Dominic, who work in a brothel just over the Belgian border. In the opening scene during a torrential downpour, the audience is immediately guessing who these three women are burying.

Black Milk is director-writer-actress Uisenma Borchu’s second film. Born in Mongolia in 1984, Borchu moved to Germany when she was four.

In South Africa the word “moffie” is a homophobic term for homosexual. It is also the title of a fine film by Oliver Hermanus.

Dea Kulumbegashvili’s debut eludes definitive characterizations. For each thought or feeling that may be generated by it, there will be another to counteract it.

Minari is an American production acted in Korean and as such qualifies for the Golden Globes’ Foreign Language category. It is a semi-autobiographical story written by director Lee Isaac Chung, who grew up in a small farm in Arkansas and it follows very closely the experiences of  a small Korean family in that state in the 1980s.