In the age of broadcasting, the Earth is flat – screen-size – with travel to faraway destinations just a one-click monthly subscription. We’ve gone through the world of options and picked the best new international movies for you to watch.
“Pinty”
Rent it on Amazon.
Only after I laughed, cried and bit my nails in suspense while watching the movie Binti, did I realize that it was categorized under the “kids” category on Amazon. Directed by Frederic Megaum, this Belgian film achieves a feat rarely seen in American children’s cinema: it folds real-life issues of racial inequality and immigration into a compelling story without compromising its audience. At the heart of this pulsating film is my 11-year-old daughter (played by Pebel Chiani Baluji), an undocumented Congolese immigrant living in Belgium with her father. She is a teen obsessed with social media and has a large following on the internet, compiled through videos that give a glamorous touch to her precarious life.
When a police raid forces Benti and her father to flee the home they’re staying in with other illegal immigrants, the trails meet Elias (Moe Packer), a white teen struggling to come to terms with his parents’ divorce. With the miraculous belief in humanity typical of children’s films, Elias and his mother decided to shelter my daughter and her father. The resulting makeshift family soon plans an instrumental dance show for an animal that Elias adores, the okapis, an endangered species related to the giraffe and endemic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Warmth and comedy cycle through these antics, but when the characters face deportation, Megum takes them with apparent seriousness, tying them all together in a realistic climax in her depiction of an unjust world and optimistic about people’s potential. – Especially children – to make things better.
“manpower”
Stream it on HBO Max.
Stylish, surprising and utterly surprising, ‘Workforce’ unfolds in the first half of this brave Kafkaesque drama about the exploited workers. After losing his brother in a workplace accident, Mexico City construction worker Francisco (Luis Alberti) tries to get compensation for his pregnant sister-in-law and is faced with an apathetic and corrupt bureaucracy. In starkly composed neo-realist scenes, director David Zunana explains the daily hardships of Francisco and his cohorts. Not only do men toil all day to build a palatial home that looks outrageous in comparison to their cramped, leaky huts, but they also suffer routine indignities at work: long hours, lost pay, discounts for petty mistakes.
But halfway through, this slowly-burning kitchen-sink drama suddenly changes, as a dark development leads Francisco and his cohorts to take control of the house and live in it with their families. The group’s deliberations and negotiations – and their astonishment at the relative luxuries now available to them – are moving and intriguing to watch. But anxiety persists and grows through it all, as Francisco turns into a slippery, morally ambiguous character. Zonana keeps his cards close to his chest until the end, turning a scathing critique of class inequality and the corruption of capital into a taut thriller.
This Malayalam superhero story begins with a real explosion. In a small village in the southern Indian state of Kerala, a wave of lightning caused by a rare astronomical event strikes two men at the same time: Jason (Tofino Thomas), a handsome young tailor who dreams of moving to America to find work; and Shibu (Guru Somasundaram), an eccentric outcast who has just returned his long-lost love to the city. Right after the bat, the movie sets an intriguing mystery. Which of these two men, both of whom quickly cough up blue phlegm and get things moving with their minds, is the superhero in the movie title (“Minal” means “lightning”)? Are they potential team members or opponents?
In a clever narrative tactic, Minnal Murali doesn’t clarify these questions until at least an hour into the film, instead tracing the two leads’ rise to power with equal sympathy and intelligence. Wearing a deceptive disguise, Jason uses his massive newfound power to teach the city’s corrupt and corrupt police a lesson, while Shipu defends his crush from corrupt men and robs a bank to help the woman’s sick daughter. Jaison signs his antics as Minnal Murali, and when the village assumes that Shibu’s adventures are also by the same masked man, confusion and rivalries arise. The stakes eventually increased, but for the most part, Basil Joseph feels less like a superhero and more like a glamorous regional comedy. Featuring a unanimously brilliant cast, the film stands out for the adorable quirks of a small village and the humble aspirations that drive even its most staunch residents.
“I ran”
Stream it on Mubi.
“Gritt” is the nickname for Gry-Jeanette, the performer at the heart of Itonje Soimer Guttormsen’s film, but it could also be a nod to a quality that the stubborn protagonist in the clouds may have surpassed. When we first met Grete, she was in New York with a Norwegian theater troupe as an assistant to an actress with Down syndrome, whom she considers with envy and resentment. It’s the latest in a string of Gritt’s globe-trotting attempts to join the avant-garde art scene, and it seemed to hold some promise when a local theater director put her in touch with a colleague in Oslo.
However, as soon as we learn, Gret has neither the resources (lacking a stable home and being denied government grants for lack of experience) nor the integrity to revive her noble ideas. In Oslo, I got an apprenticeship in the Theater of Cruelty and started working on a project with local Syrian refugees, only to spoil everything with bad decisions and selfish lies – a turnaround that eventually led to some soul-searching. With real-life artists from New York and Oslo appearing as themselves, and frenetic cinematography beckoning reality TV, “Gritt” can feel itself like performance art at times—a portrait that stimulates the viewer with its deep mystery yet striking subject matter, played with commitment Gorgeous by Birgit Larsen.
Five films to watch this winter
“Mute”
Stream it on Ovid.
The personal and the political are beautifully intertwined in Federico Atehorta Arteaga’s reflective documentary essay. The director had initially set out to make a film about what is widely seen as the beginnings of Colombian cinema: a reworking of the 1906 assassination attempt of the country’s then president, Rafael Reyes, for a photo report. While working on this project, Atehorta Arteaga’s mother fell into a sudden state of silence that doctors could not explain. In “Mute Fire,” the director draws associative connections between these two events, wrangling them together in an inspiring inquiry into performance, trauma, and the unspoken ways in which its people bear the weight of Colombia’s bloody wars.
Using archival photos and home videos, Atehortúa Arteaga deconstructs an investigation into the role that photographs play in family and historical memory. Soberly, and in a poetic voice, he weaves together the first films of Thomas Edison, who reworked the famous executions; The controversy surrounding one of the first films of its kind ever made in Colombia, which revolves around the death of political leader Rafael Uribe Uribe; and the “false positives” scandal of the Colombian army, which involved thousands of innocent men and women who were murdered and kept being killed during the country’s last civil war. Atehortúa Arteaga poignantly demonstrates that war is fought in images as much as weapons, and as these images persist through time, so are the many wounds of battle.