Golden Globe Awards

July 22, 2011 was the day the world changed for Norway. In a country which had never really seen terrorism, first a bomb exploded in the government building, then the terrorist attacked students at a summer camp hosted by Norway’s Labor Party on the island of Utøya in the Tyrifjorden lake, 24 miles northwest of Oslo, killing 77 youths.

The feature debut of 32-year-old writer-director A. B.

Zhang Yimou is one of China’s most prolific filmmakers. His classics have earned five Golden Globe nominations for Best Foreign Language Film, including To Live, Shanghai Triad, Hero, House of Flying Daggers and The Flowers of War.

What happens when you pair a Golden Globe-winning Iranian director who doesn’t speak Spanish with two actors who don’t speak Persian? Golden Globe and two-time Academy Award winner Asghar Farhadi faced just such an artistic challenge when he brought together husband and wife Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz in the haunting thriller Everybody Knows, set in a small town in Spain. Having previously shot The Past in France and A Separation in Iran, Farhadi’s style of working with his actors is pushing beyond language to find the inner machinations of the characters, where they are from and what their feelings are.

In 2014 Huang Hsin-Yao made a short film called The Great Buddha. This year he expanded it into a feature-length movie.

The second World War ended 73 years ago, but new stories about courage and resilience continue to come out of that dark chapter of history. Witness the Dutch film, The Resistance Banker – the true story of the remarkable Van Hall brothers.

Laugh or Die is a film about the zest of life and the power of laughter, even if tinged with dark humor. In the film World War I prisoners of war, who have already been sentenced to death, prepare a play to entertain their guards and the commander of German troops visiting the prison island on which they are detained.

Belarusian-American director Darya Zhuk’s debut feature, Crystal Swan (2018), tells the story of a young Belarusian city girl, Velya, attempting to get an American Visa with forged documents in the 1990s to achieve her dream of becoming a DJ in Chicago. When Velya discovers that the fake work phone number on the visa application has a typo, she must venture into the Belarusian countryside to find the apartment of the registered phone number to falsely confirm her employment.

In Harm’s Way is a Japanese production filmed in English and Mandarin by a Dutch director (Bille August), written by an American (Greg Latte) with an American actor (Emile Hirsch) leading a Chinese and Japanese cast. It's a curious oddity: before arriving at its current title, In Harm's Way (like the 1965 Pearl Harbor movie by Otto Preminger with Kirk Douglas and John Wayne), this WWII film was released in Britain as The Hidden Soldier, and premiered at 2017’s Shanghai International  Film Festival as The Chinese Widow.

Roma is more than a place. It’s a presence, a state of mind: the mind of multi-award winner Alfonso Cuarón, traveling back to his childhood to recount a very personal moment in his life which feels universal.