Foreign Language Film Submissions 2020

Based on by Luke Mogelson’s 2017 New Yorker article “The Desperate Battle to Destroy ISIS”, Mosul is a true to life action movie about a renegade Iraqi police SWAT team who disobey orders. They push fiercely against ISIS guerrilla street fights in order to save what’s left of their beloved home city of Mosul, in Northern Iraq.

Like so many foreign films this year, Canción Sin Nombre (the original title of this film) is a debut feature by a female director. Peruvian filmmaker Melina León chose a painful subject from her country’s history: in the late 1980s, Peru was a hotbed of politically motivated violence, its society in turmoil, with no oversight of its institutions, a corrupt and outdated legal system, a wealth gap of epic proportions and an outlook stuck in the dark ages when it came to women’s rights – and that’s not even taking into consideration the racist government policies affecting the indigenous part of its population.

Your Iron Lady tells the story of Teresa, played by a great Victoria del Rosal, a single mother navigating her recent move to the United States to escape a 22-year abusive marriage in Mexico. With one adult child still in Mexico and three living with her, Teresa struggles to make a new life for her family in Los Angeles.

A murder mystery set in 1955 Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the administration of President Peron, when different political forces were trying to overthrow his government. Mariano Turek and Lujan Loioco's About a Woman (Algo con una mujer) is a whodunit in which the detective is curiously a housewife, Rosa, played by Maria Soldi, a skillful seamstress who becomes the only witness of a murder.

Duque (Fernando Cayo) is a tireless detective who will not stop until his career ends. Angel (Miguel Herrán) is a marginalized young criminal who lives outside the law and outside the system, he will stop at nothing and pay any price to scale the social ladder and join the ranks of the capitalist elite from which he feels excluded.

Screenwriters, often the unsung heroes in cinema, get the spotlight for a change in Crisanto B. Aquino’s feature directing debut, Write About Love.

From My Dinner with Andre to Oleanna to Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, cinema has a rich tradition of so-called “two-handers” – movies that tightly focus on, and channel their drama primarily through, the examination of a single relationship between two people. Tawfik Baba’s Oliver Black generally fits this mold, telling the story of a nameless old man (Hassan Richiou) and a young African boy, Vendredi (Modou Mbow), wandering the desert of Morocco together.

Shot on location in Los Angeles, The Night went into production in 2018, at the onset of American President Donald Trump’s imposed sanctions against Iran – a fact that gave the project extra meaning for cast and crew, the latter of which included department heads comprised exclusively of Iranians and Iranian Americans. There was also excitement and interest in being able to dabble in the psychological horror genre, a fertile cinematic territory which has seen some of its most rich explorations of the past couple decades come from filmmakers of color – like M.

Hive, written and directed by Eylem Kaftan, is based on a documentary series Urban Farmers. The true story focuses on a female beekeeper, Ayse (Meryem Uzerli) and her fight with nature to protect her mother's hives.

In director Allan Deberton’s feature debut Pacarrete, we first meet our title character (Marcelia Cartaxo) joyously sweeping the sidewalk in front of her apartment. Rendered in lively song and dance, the ordinary activity becomes an exuberant ballet of self-expression, inviting us into the orbit of an unconventional, self-assured woman.