Golden Globe Awards

When we first meet the title character in the French drama Alice, our protagonist’s domestic life appears blissful. Alice (Emilie Piponnier) is delectably cooking with her young son when her dutiful husband François (Benjamin Bourgois) comes home from work and gives off the appearance of a doting father and adoring husband.

After exposing the abuse of a rape victim by police officers in her 2017 film, Beauty and the Dogs, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania turns her attention to another kind of abuse of the powerless by the powerful in her latest movie, The Man Who Sold His Skin. The protagonist of the film is Sam, a young Syrian from Raqqa, who’s deeply in love with his sweetheart, Abeer.

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.

Between 1948 and 1983 Golden Globes were awarded in a special category of “New Star of the Year” conceived to recognize young actors making a mark in their early roles. In this series, the HFPA’s Phil Berk highlights those that would follow their auspicious starts with distinguished careers.