Foreign Language Film Submissions 2020

New Order, by talented Mexican director Michel Franco, begins with protesters smeared in green paint storming into a lavish society wedding involving Mexico’s richest members of the upper class: the mob robs the guests of all they have on them, before shooting them in cold blood. Shocking images burn on our eyeballs as we watch a portrait of human suffering and callousness.

This film starts with Pin-Jui (Tzi-Ma), a little boy running through a sweeping rice field, calling out for his mother and father in the distance. We realize that what he sees is not real but rather the image he conjures up because he misses them so much.

Just like the board game Ludo, the film involves several stories that take shape simultaneously but separately, only to intersect eventually. As two characters in the beginning comment, “Ludo is life and life is Ludo.

The old adage, “You reap what you sow” is the theme of a rare film coming out of Aruba, an island nation not known for its movie industry. The plot falls into the narco-crime story-thriller-courtroom drama genre.

Russian director Egor Abramenko makes his feature debut with Sputnik, which merges the sci-fi genre with compelling human drama. Russia, 1983: Cold War tensions are at their peak.

The Armenian film Songs of Solomon is an earnest biopic celebrating the life of the great Armenian ethnomusicologist Komitas, who pioneered adapting folk music into symphonic works, and who during his lifetime transcribed over 3,000 pieces of Armenian folk music, more than half of which were subsequently lost: only around 1,200 are now extant. But more significantly, it is a painful testament to the systematic genocide of the Armenian people – not the mass murder of 800,000 children and over a million and a half women following the first World War, but the earlier 1895 attempt by Sultan Abdul Hamid II to wipe out Christian Armenians who for centuries before had lived together peacefully with their Muslim neighbors.

She is what you might call a cool granny – chain-smoking, feisty, with a penchant for regular psychic readings, this old Chinese lady is told by her clairvoyant that October 28 will bring a windfall of luck to her. Meanwhile, her American-born son wants her to move in with him and his family because her retirement money won’t really cover her rent and expenses much longer.

At 7:40 PM, on October 26, 1979, South Korea’s President Park Chung-hee was assassinated by Kim Jae-gyu, director of the KCIA (Korean Central Intelligence Agency, thereby ending an 18- year long dictatorship. The Man Standing Next dramatizes the 40 days leading up to the murder.

Directed by Vadim Perelman and written by Ilya Zofin, Persian Lessons is a classic survivor story. Set in occupied France in 1942, Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is arrested by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany.

“There are three kinds of people: the ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall”, says the actor who serves as a lead as well as narrator at the beginning of The Platform. He is speaking to his cell-mate, where the two are imprisoned in a large tower-style building, a vertical prison with one cell per floor, with two occupants per cell.