Each year, countries from around the world select one film for consideration in The Academy Awards® race for Best Foreign Language Film. Other than the film’s country of origin, there are very few basic criteria, so the films submitted run the gamut of personal, thrilling, timely, and historical stories from around the world.
HIFF 2018 will present the following eleven films (and counting!), all of which will proudly represent their countries in this year’s Oscar® race. (The past three winners of this award have screened at HIFF: A FANTASTIC WOMAN, THE SALESMAN, and SON OF SAUL, so our track record is on point!)
How many will *you* see this year?
BIRDS OF PASSAGE “PÁJAROS DE VERANO”
• from Colombia
Directed by Cristina Gallego + Ciro Guerra
In the follow-up to his visually stunning foreign language Oscar®-nominated EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (HIFF 2015), director Ciro Guerra depicts a single Colombian family who find themselves increasingly forced into the violence and capitalist pull of the country’s burgeoning drug trade. Co-directed alongside his longtime collaborator Cristina Gallego, BIRDS OF PASSAGE provides a visceral and multi-faceted look at the two-decade rise of the Colombian drug trade through the eyes of the indigenous communities who both helped to shape it and were subsequently devastated by it. Sprawling in scope and filled with a sense of surreal beauty, Guerra and Gallego deliver an unparalleled crime saga.
BORDER “GRÄNS”
• from Sweden
Directed by Ali Abbasi
Tina (Eva Melander), a reclusive customs officer whose enlarged face and pronounced overbite make her immediately stand out, has a unique skill: her sense of smell allows her to identify contraband coming through the border. One day, a mysterious man sets off her senses and places her on a strange path that will lead her to discover the origin of her gifts. Based on Let the Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novella, director Ali Abbasi has crafted a consistently surprising genre hybrid. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, BORDER straddles the line between romance, fantasy, and horror in its examination of one person’s struggle to realize her place in the world.
Competition section sponsored by Netflix
BURNING
• from South Korea
Directed by Lee Chang-dong
Years after leaving his small northern hometown for Seoul, an aspiring writer (Yoo Ah-in) unexpectedly runs into a childhood acquaintance (Jeon Jong-seo). Their chance encounter soon blossoms into a tentative relationship, until her return from an impromptu trip with a mysterious new companion (Steven Yeun, The Walking Dead) sets in motion an accidental love triangle that soon morphs into something much more sinister. Based on Haruki Murakami’s short story Barn Burning, director Lee Chang-dong’s masterful film became one of the most celebrated titles of the last decade upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival—an exhilarating thriller that is as precise as it is undefinable.
CAPERNAUM
• from Lebanon
Directed by Nadine Labaki
Scraping by on the chaotic streets of Beirut, 12-year-old Zain (Zain al Rafeea) is one of many children born into an uncertain future in the city’s slum. Living a deeply troubled home life and branded the sole caretaker of an abandoned toddler, Zain makes the desperate move of suing his negligent parents for giving him life and trapping him in a hostile world. Utilizing a cast of non-professional actors (including two revelatory performances from its child leads), Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s Cannes Jury Prize winner is a stirring slice of social-realist protest cinema, driven equally by righteous anger and enduring empathy, and sure to be one of the most talked about films of the year.
Spotlight section sponsored by Audi
COLD WAR “ZIMNA WOJNA”
• from Poland
Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski
In the midst of tremendous political upheaval, two folk musicians meet in post-war Poland, where one attempts to escape a troubled past while the other increasingly questions the pair’s role in the country’s propaganda machine. Soon they fall in love and find fame in the smoke-lit bars of Eastern Europe, setting in motion a relationship that will span decades and cross borders. Sumptuously shot in beautiful black and white, Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski (in the follow-up to his Foreign Language Academy Award® winner IDA) returns to his home country with an achingly seductive tale of love and loss.
THE GUILTY “DEN SKYLDIGE”
• from Denmark
Directed by Gustav Möller
Following a suspension, police officer Asger Holm (a hypnotic Jakob Cedergren), is re-assigned as an emergency dispatcher. During one seemingly typical night he receives a unusually distressing call, and slowly realizes that the woman on the other end of the line has been kidnapped. Confined to his desk with only his direct line of communication to aid him, Holm must act without delay in order to save her. Winner of audience awards at Sundance, Rotterdam, Montclair and more, first-time director Gustav Möller experiments with the boundaries of traditional narrative to create one of the year’s most suspenseful thrillers.
“I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS”
• from Romania
Directed by Radu Jude
In the latest provocation from Romanian director Radu Jude, local theater director Mariana Marin (Ioana Iacob) prepares to stage a public recreation of the 1941 Odessa Massacre, an often-ignored ethnic cleansing in which tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were murdered at the hands of Romanian soldiers. As Mariana attempts to push back on both calls for censorship from a city representative looking for a more traditional display of nationalist pride and a burgeoning mutiny amongst her cast of local volunteers, Jude crafts a timely and constantly engaging examination of the ways in which barbarism is not only defined by its perpetrators, but by those insistent on pushing it to the sidelines of history as well.
NEVER LOOK AWAY “WERK OHNE AUTOR”
• from Germany
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Inspired by real events and spanning three eras of German history, NEVER LOOK AWAY tells the story of a young art student, Kurt (Tom Schilling) who falls in love with fellow student Ellie (Paula Beer). Ellie’s father, Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a famous doctor, is dismayed at his daughter’s choice of boyfriend, and vows to destroy the relationship. What neither of them knows is that their lives are already connected through a terrible crime Seeband committed decades ago.
ROMA
• from Mexico
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
Inspired by the early 1970s Mexico City of his childhood, celebrated auteur Alfonso Cuarón (GRAVITY, CHILDREN OF MEN, Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN) returns with this semi-autobiographical look at a middle-class family making a life for itself within a time of political turbulence and patriarchal rule. Filmed on a giant canvas in 65mm and utilizing stunningly detailed black and white photography, ROMA recreates the world of his past with cinematic grandeur and vibrancy. Acting as his own cinematographer and working with a remarkable cast of largely unknown actors, Cuarón places the viewer in the middle of a world alive with the anxious energy of the period, while paying respect to the individuals who would help to shape his life.
Spotlight section sponsored by Audi
SHOPLIFTERS “MANBIKI KAZOKU”
• from Japan
Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
The winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, prolific Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda (LIKE FATHER LIKE SON, HIFF 2013) returns to the festival with a nuanced, heartbreaking look at a family of misfits living in the margins of contemporary Tokyo. Making a life for themselves by shoplifting from local grocery stores and foraging food where they can, the film’s central family find their impoverished but tranquil life threatened when they take a young girl under their wing, and her abusive parents fight back for custody. An impassioned plea for those struggling to stay afloat, this is another must-see from one of international cinema’s greatest filmmakers.
WOMAN AT WAR “KONA FER Í STRÍД
• from Iceland
Directed by Benedikt Erlingsson
Fifty-year-old choir teacher Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) has, on the surface, an uneventful life in her Icelandic countryside home. By day a pillar of the local community, Halla leads a secret life as an eco-terrorist, devoting herself to a campaign against the aluminum industry by sabotaging local electric pylons and spearheading factory sieges. When the balance of her dual life is threatened by the approval of a longstanding adoption request, she is forced to decide whether to sacrifice the cause for the desire to settle down. Examining the nuanced relationship between the personal and the political with an unexpectedly offbeat, comic tone, WOMAN AT WAR is a stirring tale from emerging Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson.
