Trailer (no subtitles, but largely English) It follows three residents in the building, which had become an artists’ enclave, in the time just before it was destroyed.Ĭameroon’s fourth-ever Oscar submission (one of which was disqualified), “Hidden Dreams” is set in the 1980s and deals with a British-trained scout who is sent to a small village. This film’s title comes from a massive apartment building in Phnom Penh that was built in the early 1960s but demolished in 2017.
The movie won the best-film award at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Antonio Saboia plays a police officer who is fired for excessive violence and then travels across the country in search of a woman he met online.Ī comedy that deals with the hot-button subject of immigration, “Fear” deals with a Bulgarian schoolteacher who is ostracized by the residents of her small village when she takes in a refugee from Mali. While many observers of the Oscar race expected Brazil to submit the acclaimed, Netflix-distributed drama “7 Prisoners,” the country’s selection committee instead went with this love story from young filmmaker (and former prison guard) Aly Muritiba (“Rust”). When he’s taken ill, he turns to a homeless man who may have healing powers.īosnia and Herzegovina: “The White Fortress”Ī coming-of-age story that also examines the class system and corruption in modern-day Sarajevo, “The White Fortress” stars Pavle Cemerikic as a teenager who runs afoul of a local mobster and also romances an upper-class girl. Russo’s second film to represent Bolivia at the Oscars (after 2016’s “Dark Skull”) follows a laid-off miner on a week-long walk to La Paz to appeal for his job.
This Palm Springs International Film Festival audience-award winner is about a city-bred schoolteacher and aspiring singer-songwriter who teaches in a remote mountain town in the Himalayas. ‘Playground’ Film Review: School Is Hell in Brutal Belgian Drama The film’s long, unbroken takes and child’s-eye-level photography puts the viewer in the place of a young girl who finds herself and her brother mercilessly bullied at school. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section, Laura Wandel’s feature debut “offer(s) an uncommonly cold and unflinching depiction of childhood far removed from even the faintest glimmers of sentimentality,” TheWrap’s Ben Croll wrote. The film screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year, where it was the first-ever selection from Bangladesh. The central figure in this psychological drama is an obsessed professor of medicine (Azmeri Haque Badhon) who finds another teacher at her school sexually abusing a student. As an important match approaches, the player hides on an island whose only occupants are an old man and some wild horses. Winner of the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year, “Great Freedom” stars Franz Rogowski as a man who is imprisoned in post World War II Germany for being gay, and Georg Friedrich as the convicted murder who becomes his cellmate and closest friend.Ī Western Asian spin on “The Queen’s Gambit?” The lead character in Azerbaijan’s entry is a chess master with parent problems, but in this case the chess star is male, with a domineering father and coach.