Films From Across the Globe: A Good Start For Beginners.

By: kuxa kanema

Below is a list of films from various different countries in the world. This a not a “best of list” so my particular choices do not always represent my favourite films from those countries. This is not a mission for me to see every film from every country either, but rather an attempt to collate a list of films which are culturally or historically significant in each particular country. Obviously one film cannot sum up a whole country’s cinematic history, but can be an opening or WINDOW to discovering more. I tried to be interesting in choices and didn’t want to include the usual Kurosawa, Bergman, Hitchcok etc as there is more to cinema than just these names and much more to discover.

CANADA, Calendar, Atom Egoyan, 1993

My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin, 2007
Pas de deux, Norman McClaren, 1968
The Confessional, Robert Lepage, 1995
Orderers, Michel Brault, 1974
Last Night, Don Mckellar, 1998
Top of His Head, Peter Mettler, 1989
An Imaginary Tale, Andre Forcier, 1991
Highway 61, Bruce McDonald, 1995
Jesus of Montreal, Denys Arcand, 1989

USA, Husbands, John Cassavetes, 1970
,
Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese, 1973
Treasure of the Sierra Madre, John Huston, 1948
Cockfighter, Monte Hellman, 1974
He Who Gets Slapped, Victor Sjostrom, 1924
Broadway Danny Rose, Woody Allen, 1984
Inland Empire, David Lynch, 2006
Images, Robert Altman, 1972
Rushmore, Wes Anderson, 1998
Grey Gardens, Albert Maysles, 1976

MEXICO, El, Luis Bunuel, 1953

Ano Una, Jonas Cuaron, 2007
Deep Crimson, Arturo Ripstein, 1996
Sangre, Amant Escalante, 2005
Lake Tahoe, Fernando Eimbcke, 2008
Raging Sun, Raging Sky, Julian Hernandez, 2009
Dona Herlanda and Her Son, Jaime Hermosillo, 1985
’Til Death, Fernando Sarinana, 1994
El Violin, Francisco Vargas, 2005
Fando and Lis, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1968

JAMAICA, The Harder They Come, Perry Henzell, 1972

Smile Orange, Trevor D Rhone, 1976
Countryman, Dickie Jobson, 1982

CUBA, Lucia, Humberto Solas, 1968

The Twelve Chairs, Tomas Gutierrez-Alea, 1962
The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin, Julio Garcia Espinosa, 1967

HAITI, Royal Bonbon, Charles Najman, 2002

Moloch Tropical, Raoul Peck, 2009
White Darkness, Richard Stanley, 2002

VENEZUELA, Araya, Margot Benacerraf, 1959

Oriana, Fina Torres, 1985
To Play and To Fight, Alberto Arvelo, 2006
Portable Country, Ivan Feo, 1979
Postcards From Leningrad, Mariana Rondon, 2007

COLOMBIA, the Rose Seller, Victor Gavria, 1998

ECUADOR, Cronicas, Sebastian Cordero, 2004

PERU, Days of Santiago, Josue Mendez, 2004

BRAZIL, Macunaima, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969

Black God, White Devil, Glauber Rocha, 1964
Central Station, Walter Salles, 1998
Pixote, Hector Babenco, 1981
Vidas Secas, Nelson Pereira Dos Santos, 1963

BOLIVIA, The Courage of the People, Jorge Sanjines, 1971

*Sexual Dependancy, Rodrogo Bellot, 2003
Chuquiago, Antonio Eguino, 1976
Vuelve Sebastina, Jordi Esteva, 1952

PARAGUAY, Miss Amerigua, Luis Vera, 1994

URUGUAY, Whisky, Pablo Stoll, Juan Rebella 2004

Pope’s Toilet, Cesar Charlone, 2006

CHILE, Jackal of Nahueltoro, Miguel Littin 1969
Tony Manero, Pablo Larrain, 2008
Amnesia, Gonzalo Justiniano, 1994
Machuca, Andres Wood, 2004
La Frontera, Ricardo Larrain, 1991

ARGENTINA, Man Facing South East, Eliseo Subiela, 1986

*The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel, 2004
XXY, Lucia Puenzo, 2007
Family Law, Daniel Burman, 2004
I The Worst of All, Maria Luisa Bemberg, 1986
Official Story, Luis Puenzo, 1985
Lion’s Den, Pablo Trapero, 2008
Los Muertos, Lisandro Alonso, 2004
La Leon, Santiago Othegay, 2007
Glue, Alexis Dos Santos, 2006

EYGPT, La Anam, Salah Abouseif, 1958

*Night of Counting Years, Chadi Abdel Salam 1969
My Wife and the Dog, Said Marzouk, 1971
The Thief and the Dogs, Kamal El Sheikh, 1962
Nightingale’s Prayer, Henry Barakat, 1959

TUNISIA, Hafaouine, Ferid Boughedir,1990

Man of Ashes, Nouri Bouzid, 1986
Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli, 1994

ALGERIA, Bled Number One, Rabah Ameur Zaimeche, 2006

Chronicle of the Years of Fire, Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, 1975
Omar Gatlato, Merzak Allouache, 1976
Inland, Tariq Teguia, 2008

MOROCCO, A Thousand Months, Faouizi Benzaidi 2003

Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets, Nabil Ayouch, 2000
The End, Hisham Lasri, 2011

MAURITANIA, Waiting For Happiness,Abderrahmane Sissako, 2002

Oh Soleil, Med Hondo, 1967
Safrana, Sidney Sokhona, 1978

MALI, Finye, Souleymane Cisse, 1982

Faraw Mother of the Dunes, Abdoulaye Ascofare, 1997

SENEGAL, Xala, Ousmane Sembene, 1975

Touki Bouki, Djibril Mambety,

BURKINA FASO, Yaaba, Idrissa Ouedraogo, 1989

Reves de Poussiere, Laurent Salgues, 2006
Night of Truth, Fanta Regina Nacro, 2004

CHAD, Abouna, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2002

CAMEROON, Africa I Will Fleece You, Jean Marie Teno, 1993

The Bloodiest, Jean Pierre Bekolo, 2006
Sisters In Law, Kim Longinotto, Florence Ayisi, 2005

MOZAMBIQUE, Kuxa Kanmea, Margarida Cardoso, 2003

BENIN, Divine Carcasse, Dominique Lareau, 1998

IVORY COAST, Woubi Cherri, Laurent Bocahout, 1998*

ANGOLA, Sambizanga, Sarah Maldoror, 1972

SOUTH AFRICA, Farewell Johnny, Jans Rautenbach, 1970

Mapantsula, Oliver Schmitz, 1988
U-Carmen, Mark Dornford May, 2005
Dirkie Lost In the Desert, Jamie Uys, 1969

AUSTRALIA, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, 1975
Three students and a school teacher disappear on an excursion to Hanging Rock, in Victoria, on Valentine’s Day, 1900. Widely regarded as being based on a true story, the movie follows those that disappeared, and those that stayed behind, but it delights in the asking of questions, not the answering of them.

NEW ZEALAND, Rain, Christine Jeffs, 2001
At a cottage on the water’s edge of the Mahurangi Peninsula in the New Zealand summer of 1972, Janey must deal with the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and care for her little brother, Jim. When a photographer named Cady docks nearby, her mother gravitates toward him while her dad grows depressed. Janey, meanwhile, copes with her budding sexuality and impending adulthood.

SINGAPORE, 15, Roystan Tan, 2003
Fast, frenetic, and furious, 15 is the story of five Singaporian teenagers who, abandoned by the system and estranged from their parents and life in general, build their own world in which gangs, drugs, fighting, piercing, self-harm and suicide are common and brotherhood is important above all else. Presents the chaotic lives of these boys, living in the shadows of a sprawling metropolis and with only each other to rely on.

INDONESIA, Opera Jawa, Gavin Nugroho, 2006
This is the story about Setyo, Siti and Ludiro, who were the performer of Javanese Ramayana’s Wayang Wong. Setyo and Siti are spouse who live in a village by selling earthenware products. In the village, live as well Ludiro, the head of the stockyard, who is very wealthy and secretly in love with Siti. Conflicts arrived as Setyo’s earthenware company is going bankrupt and Siti started to took notice in Ludiro’s desire to win her love. These triangle love transform into a civil war in the village that brings not only extremity and injustice, but also the death of the loved ones

PHILIPPINES, Manila: In the Claws of Darkness, Lino Brocka, 1975
Julio is only recently arrived to the city having left behind his impoverished but relatively dignified and happy life as a fisherman in a small village to find his girlfriend Ligaya who had herself gone to the city at the promise of a job and some educational opportunities only to disappear completely a short time later. Julio’s episodic experiences in the city give Brocka a chance to exhibit all sorts of social issues as Julio is robbed of his savings before the film even begins and is forced to seek employment at an unsafe construction site. He agrees to work for a low wage and fails to even receive the meager pay he bargained for; the construction company can get away with this because of a lazy, inefficient government that apparently does nothing for its working class people.

MALAYSIA, I Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, Tsai Ming Liang 2006
Homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, Hsiao Kang is robbed, beaten and left for dead; he is found and nursed by Rawang, an immigrant worker, who lives in the shell of a modernist building abandoned during construction. Rawang`s feelings for his patient may or may not be sexual, but there`s definitely something like lust in the eyes of Chyi, a waitress in a run-down old coffee shop, when they light upon the recovering Hsiao Kang. And so a triangle forms as a blanket of noxious fog settles on the city and everyone has trouble breathing. Simultaneously erotic and comical, the film underpins director Tsai`s deadpan allegory with hints of social realism.

VIETNAM, Cyclo, Anh Hung Tran, 1995
A young man who struggles through life by earning some money with his bicycle-taxi in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh city) gets contact to a group of criminals. They introduce him to the mafia-world of drugs and crime.

THAILAND, Syndromes of A Century, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006
“Syndromes and a Century” is comprised almost entirely of beautifully composed and rigorously sustained medium and long shots, with few close-ups, very little camera movement and only minimal editing within scenes. Thus, even though we may not always understand fully what is going on, we are lulled into the movie by the seductive, hypnotic rhythms and style of the film-making.

BANGLADESH, Last Thakur, Sadik Ahmed, 2008
A lone gun-man enters a typical Bangladeshi town to find his identity and take revenge on the person who raped his mother during the war. In the course of revenge he is used by the internal clash of two rival leaders of the town.

SRI LANKA, Nidhanaya, Lester James Peries, 1972
Superstition, religion, love and madness come into play in this Ceylonese drama. Willie is an architect and has many Western values. When he inherits the family house (and the family debts) he cannot forget the family superstition that a treasure is hidden beneath a rock and can be found if someone in the family marries a woman with certain beauty marks and then sacrifices her. Willie searches, and finally finds such a woman. He keeps his distance from her, as he plans to kill her, but when he falls ill, she nurses him back to health. This contact causes him to forget all about his plan. However, a financial reversal reminds him of it.

INDIA, Days and Nights In the Forest, Satyajit Ray, 1970
The plot of the movie goes back to a similar outing the writer Sunil Gangopadhyay took in the early days of his poetic career. The story unfolds around a group of four friends, quite unlike each other and yet bonded together deeply. The four friends are all educated and comes from different layers of society, but the urge to escape from the daily grinding of city forces them to go out into the land of tribes.

PAKISTAN, Silent Water, Sabiha Sumar, 2003
Ayesha is a seemingly well-adjusted middle-aged woman whose life centres around her son Saleem -a gentle, dreamy 18-year-old, in love with Zubeida. They live in the village of Charkhi in Punjab, Pakistan. Ayesha’s husband is dead and she manages a living from his pension and by giving Qur’an lessons to young girls. The story begins in 1979, in a Pakistan under President General Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law. Zia-ul-Haq manipulated the interpretation of Islam and misguided a whole generation of uneducated young people. These radicalized young people were needed at that time to fight the Soviets, who had occupied neighbouring Afghanistan

BHUTAN, Milarepa, Netan Chokling, 2006
Milarepa depicts the humble beginnings of the man who was to become Tibet’s greatest saint. A true story based on centuries-old oral traditions, a youthful Milarepa is propelled into a world of sorrow and betrayal after his father’s sudden death. Destitute and hopeless, he sets out to learn black magic – and exact revenge on his enemies – encountering magicians, demons, an enigmatic teacher and unexpected mystical power along the way.

AFGHANISTAN, Osama, Siddiq Barmak, 2003
A 12-year-old Afghan girl and her mother lose their jobs when the Taliban closes the hospital where they work. The Taliban have also forbidden women to leave their houses without a male “legal companion.” With her husband and brother dead, killed in battle, there is no one left to support the family. Without being able to leave the house, the mother is left with nowhere to turn. Feeling that she has no other choice, she disguises her daughter as a boy. Now called ‘Osama,’ the girl embarks on a terrifying and confusing journey as she tries to keep the Taliban from finding out her true identity

IRAN, Under the Olive Trees, Abbas Kiarostami 1994
Hossein Rezai plays a local stonemason turned actor who, outside the film set, makes a marriage proposal to his leading lady, a student recently orphaned after the earthquake. She considers his offer insulting however, as he is poor and illiterate, and refuses to speak to him again. She continues to ignore him even when they are filming, as she seems to have trouble grasping the difference between her role and real life.

IRAQ, Ahlaam, Mohamed Al Daradji, 2005
Scarred Baghdad 2003… confusion, uncertainty and death engulf the bombed ruins of a Psychiatric asylum. Voyeuristically we move between the past and the present of three Iraqi lives entangled by the chaos of the American ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign

ISRAEL, Band’s Visit, Eran Korilan, 2007
An Egyptian brass band heads to Israel to perform at the opening ceremony of a brand new Arab arts center. But when the musicians arrive, they are stranded at the airport and have no idea where to go. A few phone calls and one bus ride later, the band has arrived in an Israeli town, the wrong Israeli town, having successfully journeyed from forgotten to mislaid. There, amid the dust and the wind, the Egyptians meet a handful of curious (and agonizingly bored) Israelis who, with degrees of easy and grudging hospitality, offer them shelter, food, distraction, engagement, a few nips of booze, some shaky turns around a roller-skating rink and curious, fleeting companionship.

PALESTINE, Paradise Now, Hany Abu Assad, 2005
The story places two close friends, Palestinians Said and Khaled, recruited by an extremist group to perpetrate a terrorist attack in Tel-Aviv, blowing up themselves. However, things go wrong and both friends must separate in the border. One of them, maintaining in his purpose of carry the attack to the end, and the other will have his doubts about it.

LEBANON Caramel Nadine Labaki, 2007
In “Caramel” we get to follow the daily live of four lebanese women woking in a beauty salon in Beirut. They all struggle with different problems, Layale is stuck in a dead-end relationship with a married man, Nisrine is no longer a virgin but is set to be married to a muslim, Rima is attracted to women and Jamale, a regular customer and wannabe actress, is worried about getting old. We also meet Rose, a seamstress with a shop next to the salon, she is an old woman who has devoted her life to taking care of her mentally unbalanced older sister Lili, but has now found her first love.

TURKEY, Kasaba, Nuri Blige Ceylan, 1997
The story of a family living in a small godforsaken town in Turkey seen through the eyes of children and dealing with the growing complexity when one becomes an adult.

CHINA, Pickpocket, Jia Zhangke, 1997
Little pocket thief Wu never got away from the streets like his friends did. He realises that he is alone, as his old buddy doesn’t invite him for his wedding. When he falls in love with a hooker he is forced to think about his future. Can he break with his criminal past?

JAPAN, Violence At Noon, Nagisa Oshima, 1966
Hakuchu no Torima" is the portrayal of a violent rapist as seen through the recollections of his wife and one of his victims. As the film starts, Eisuke (Kei Sato) encounters Shino (Saeda Kawaguchi), who works as a maid in a house. She is a former coworker from a failed collective farm, whose life he once saved — only to rape her. Soon, Eisuke’s criminal pattern of rapes and murders emerges as he goes on assaulting women (Shino being the witness of one of them, as Eisuke tries to violate her employer). When cooperating with the police on making a description of the rapist, Shino withholds her crucial knowledge of his identity. She prefers writing letters to Eisuke’s dutiful wife, Matsuko, a schoolteacher (Akiko Koyama — Mrs Oshima), in order to expose his true nature and perhaps induce her into turning Eisuke over to the police.

TAIWAN, Terroriser, Edward Yang, 1986
Three groups of complete strangers are shown to have their lives intertwined in strange ways in this enigmatic thriller. An amateur photographer witnesses a police raid on a gang during which one, a girl, escapes. Meanwhile, a doctor and his wife are having a difficult time together. He is completely obsessed with his career, she is obsessed by her need for romance and by her presumption that he is being unfaithful to her. The escaped girl has been locked up at home by her worried mother, and to ease her boredom she makes random telephone calls. During one of these, she calls the doctor’s wife and claims to have been having an affair with him. At the same time, the photographer has been growing increasingly obsessed with his photographs of the escaped girl.

HONG KONG, Mad Detective, Johnny To, 2007
Inspector Bun is a brilliant detective who is forced into retirement after presenting his retiring boss with a severed ear. Bun’s gift is that he can supposedly see a person’s “inner personalities,” or hidden ghosts. Years later, Inspector Ho Ka-On visits Bun in an attempt to break the case of Wong Kwok-Chu, a colleague who went missing when he and his partner, Ko Chi-Wai were in pursuit of a suspect. Wong has been AWOL for 18 months, and his gun has been used in a series of armed robberies.

SOUTH KOREA, Lies, Sun-Woo Jang, 1999
A conscious exploration of fantasy and flesh. The director talks about the novel upon which the film is based, we see the crew at work, the actors talk about what’s going on. Y, a schoolgirl of 18, chooses her first lover (rather than wait to be raped, as were her two older sisters). After phone sex with J, a sculptor who’s 38, they begin an affair that, by the second meeting, includes spankings as foreplay. J brings a suitcase full of rods, hoses, and wires; Y gathers sticks to bring. Y’s brother discovers the affair. J’s wife, studying in Paris, calls him to join her. Will the lovers part? Will the violence get out of hand? When do the lies begin?

MONGOLIA, Tsogt Taij, T. Khurlee, 1947
A very rare and classic Mongolian film from 1945 but it’s difficult to find detailed info about it.

ARMENIA, Vodka Lemon, Hineer Salem, 2003
In a remote, isolated village in post-Soviet Armenia, Hamo, a widower with a pitiful pension and three worthless sons, travels daily to his wife’s grave. There he meets the lovely Nina, who is communing with her late husband. The two are penniless—she works in a local bar that is about to close down, while he has been forced to start selling his meager possessions. All seems hopelessly bleak, yet as Hamo begins to court Nina, their unexpected union revitalizes them.

GEORGIA, Wishing Tree, Tengiz Abuladze, 1976
Abuladze’s film is a magically sustained fantasia about life in a Georgian village on the eve of the revolution, poetry rather than narrative thrust carrying it from one incident to another. The characters are eccentric, and their dreams and longings are gently indulged, from the simpleton who searches for the tree that will fulfil his wishes, to the dishevelled lady fortune-teller who promises herself the return of a long-lost lover. The central focus is a tragic love story (sweethearts denied marriage by the village elders), and this, more than any overtly political points, serves to intimate the social changes to come.

TAJIKISTAN, To Get To Heaven First You Have To Die, Djamshed Usmanov, 2006
Kamal, 20 years old, can’t have sexual intercourse with women although he is married. He goes to the big city and notices beautiful Vera, whom he follows round town. Will his partnership with her husband, a mafia thug, help him become a man ?

KAZAKSTAN, Mongol, Sergi Bodrov, 2007
The movie is an epic story of a young Genghis Khan and how events in his early life lead him to become a legendary conqueror. The 9-year-old Temüjin is taken on a trip by his father to select a girl as his future wife. He meets Börte, who says she would like to be chosen, which he does. He promises to return after five years to marry her. Temüjin’s father is poisoned on the trip, and dies. As a boy Temüjin passes through starvation, humiliations and even slavery, but later with the help of Börte he overcomes all of his childhood hardships to become one of the greatest conquerors the world has ever known.

UZBEKISTAN, Bo Ba Bu, Ali Khamrayev, 1998
A rare film to come out of Uzbekistan, Bo Ba Bu is a visual work with very little dialogue. The communication is through body language and guttural sounds. One day, a shepherd named Bo finds a badly hurt woman in the desert. He takes her to the sheep farm that he runs with his younger brother Bu. The woman, whom the brothers name Ba, seems to have lost the power of speech. She makes no effort to communicate with the brothers, who soon begin to feel possessive and jealous about their new acquisition. The film’s beautiful landscape of merciless desert implies a continuous fight for survival, particularly when all must be done according to rituals decided a long time before.

RUSSIA, Wings, Larisa Shepitko, 1966
A fascinating and human portrayal of a once-famous fighter pilot and loyal Stalinist named Nadezhda Petrovna. Now a 41-year-old provincial schoolmistress, she has so internalized the military ideas of service and obedience that she cannot adjust to life in peacetime.

UKRAINE, Legend of Princess Olga, Yuri Ilyenko,1983
Epic film, about Princess Olga a ruler of Kiev dynasty.

MOLDOVA, Palms, Artour Aristakisian, 1993
A man without the bottom half of his legs who pushes himself with a rolling cart down the sidewalk. A woman who lies flat on the concrete in order to make love to Christ. A young male who stares emptily from basement steps beneath a sidewalk. A heavyset man who’s blind and who has been told by his sightless parents that everyone else is blind as well, that no one can see what he cannot. These are the men and women the narrator (Aristakisyan) tells us about. He directs these stories to his unborn baby, as cautionary reminders of life and advice to maneuver through the monolithic “system” responsible for the societal decay he describes. The narrator makes reference to many disturbing ideas, including the likelihood that the current one-month-old fetus will soon be aborted, scraped from its mother’s womb, and that the mother and father aren’t married, even possibly that they’re siblings. He also makes a point of telling his doomed child to never listen to anyone, including the narrating father. Later, he begs the unborn child to maintain poverty and virginity at all costs, to avoid being controlled or fornicated by the “system.”

ESTONIA, Darkness In Tallinn, Ilka Jarvi-Laturi, 1993
In August, 1991, Estonia reclaims its independence from the USSR and brings to its national bank nearly $1 billion in gold bullion hidden in Paris for 50 years. Russian mobsters have a bold plan to hijack the gold after shutting down the capital’s power at midnight. For this they need Toivo, an electrical technician. His wife is pregnant and she urges him to take the job (“$5000 buys lots of baby food”). After Toivo leaves for the plant, his wife goes into labor. Birth and blackout happen simultaneously; the baby needs an incubator, but there’s no power. Jealousies within the Mob undercut the plan’s smooth operation, and soon the Mob has Toivo to deal with as well.

LITHUANIA, A casa Sharunas Bartas,1997
The House (1997) opens to the image of a mansion as the narrator reads a confessional letter written to his mother about their inability to communicate with each other. The house and mother are, of course, metaphors for the motherland that would be explored in the two hours that follow. It seems to me that The House is the film that Bartas finally comes to terms with the trauma dealt by the country’s recent past that he has consistently expressed in his work. Consequently, the film also seems like a summation of the director’s previous films

LATVIA, Aizliegta Zona, Herz Frank, 1975
This Herz Frank’s documentary is influenced by his work in the evening papers. Many of his journalistic reports became material for his future films. “Restricted Area” is one of those movies. As a newspaper correspondent, Frank went to the courts, followed the criminal chronicle – as a lawyer he was especially interested in it. In 1963 he made a photo essay in Cesis colony for juvenile delinquents and published it in the newspaper. Restricted Area was shot on the same spot eleven years later

GREECE, Reconstruction, Theo Angelopoulos, 1970
This film portrays multiple reconstructions of a domestic crime in a poverty stricken and dying part of rural post war Greece. For the director, portraying the rock strewn environment of a community in decline is a key message, giving us beautiful if somewhat depressing and repetitive images. This is a setting for the crime and subsequent investigation, which is of limited interest. This true story is not an unusual one in life or films/ literature and the multiple reconstructions, very slow pace and banal setting further rob it of dramatic tension. The reconstructions specifically lead to repetition and perhaps some confusion. Characterisation and scenes are well handled, though again tending to follow expected patterns, perhaps precisely because it is based on court transcripts. Overall, critically acclaimed and visually stunning, but you may
find it seems rather longer than it actually is.

CYPRUS, Under the Stars, Christos Georgiou, 2001
A road movie dealing with the lives of two Greek Cypriots whose lives have been torn apart by the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974. After a period of intense fighting, the UN intervenes and draws a Green Line through the middle of Cyprus, separating the Turkish and Greek territories. Twenty-six years later, Lukas lives a hermit’s life in the divided city of Nicosia, haunted by memories of the past. Like Lukas, Phoebe is a child of the war, but unlike him she refuses to dwell on painful memories. Instead, she lives for the present, working as a smuggler, trading goods with Greeks and Turks on both sides of the border.

RUMANIA, California Dreamin, Christian Nemescu, 2007
Winner of the prestigious Cannes award Un Certain Regard in 2007, Cristian Nemescus film is based on a true story: a NATO train transporting military equipment is stopped in the middle of nowhere by an overzealous chief of a Romanian train station. Set against the backdrop of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the film explores with humor and gritty realism the impact that the arrival of the American soldiers led by Captain Jones has on the small village community. A cinematic tour de force not to be missed!

BULGARIA, Ikonostastat, Christo Christov, 1969
In late 19th century, a carver-cutter arrives in a little town to make the iconostasis of the newly built church. He is being accommodated in the house of a respected family. He is working slowly because of his love for the daughter of his hosts. They resist in every possible way and pay a high price: Their daughter dies. Though in despair, the master completes the iconostasis: a masterpiece the locals perceive as a heresy. And he leaves once again without any destination.

MACEDONIA, Before the Rain, Milcho Manchevski, 1994
The circularity of violence seen in a story that circles on itself. In Macedonia, during war in Bosnia, Christians hunt an ethnic Albanian girl who may have murdered one of their own. A young monk who’s taken a vow of silence offers her protection. In London, a photographic editor who’s pregnant needs to talk it out with her estranged husband and chooses a toney restaurant. She wants permanence with her lover, a prize-winning Macedonian photographer just back from Bosnia, changed by the violence. He leaves abruptly for his village; he’s not visited it in 16 years. There he tries to ignore bitter divisions between his Orthodox brethren and local Albanians, then tries to transcend them

SERBIA, Underground, Emir Kusturica, 1995
The story follows an underground weapons manufacturer in Belgrade during WWII and evolves into fairly surreal situations. A black marketeer who smuggles the weapons to partisans doesn’t mention to the workers that the war is over, and they keep producing. Years later, they break out of their underground “shelter” - only to convince themselves that the war is still going on.

SLOVENIA, Spare Parts, Damjan Kozole, 2003
Embittered widower, Ludvik, spends his nights transporting illegal refugees in his van from Croatia, across Slovenia, and into Italy. The young and inexperienced Rudi acts as his helpmate. Together they become a well-trained duo who almost every night convey “spare parts” to Italy. Of course the story of their illegitimate exports into Europe ends tragically, for everyone. The whole idea of this account is that everyone – including ourselves – is looking for happiness: the “spare parts” because of the misery they are plunged into without, and our characters because they can’t find it inside.

BOSNIA, Esma’s Secret, Jasmila Zbanic, 2006
Set against the backdrop of a former Yugoslavia of the nineteen-nineties, this is a single mother’s anguish of how one must deal with truths and how to cope with a war’s terrible past. With a twelve year old daughter to bring-up, both mother and child come head-to-head when a school trip is in the air and complications and rude awakenings arise from the ashes’ of the cold and callous days of conflict, xenophobia and its secrets.

CROATIA, Border Post, Rajko Grlic, 2006
At a small border-post on the Yugoslav-Albanian border, yet another generation of soldiers suffering the usual amount of boredom awaits the end of their service, counting days to the moment when they should take their uniforms off for good. It is the spring of 1987 and the thought never even crosses their mind that they would, in fact, put them back on quite soon and go to war. These are the last days of the country called Yugoslavia. Yet no one knew at the time.

HUNGARY, Love, Karoly Makk, 1971
This tender black-and-white Hungarian drama takes place in the ‘50s. A woman’s (Mari Torocsik) husband has been arrested by the Hungarian secret police and imprisoned as a dissident. The young wife lives with her mother-in-law (Lili Darvas), a sweet and magnetic woman, appears to believe that her son has emigrated to America. Unable to do anything about her husband’s imprisonment, the daughter-in-law keeps the old woman’s good cheer alive by concocting a series of letters from her husband, wherein he does incredible and wonderful things.

SLOVAKIA, Cristove Roky, Juraj Jakubisco, 1967
Tragicomic statement about the need of final decision of the man at the crossing of the life. Artist Juraj, Slovak livining at Prague, starts to understands indirection of his life without any obligations after he turns thirty. He starts gradually realize his situation through relations with people around him. And he tries to live his life from new start.

CZECH, REPUBLIC, Diamonds of the Night, Jan Nemec, 1964
This picture of escape of two Czech boys from a transport of the death is accelerated and meaningfully deepened by retrospective memories of one the boys. As the threat grows, in boy’s repeated projections of his dreams and wishes, all the human is replaced by animality. Naturalistically and lively pictured situation of refugees – their starvation, tiredness, anxiety, compulsion of self-preservation – imply the attempt of saving for any price. Couple becomes baited game, which is hunted by senile greybeards from Sudet village, picturing the sway of powerless. Movie interprets stream of consciousness, transposes internal vision into rigorous and original form, unfolding depth of anxiety, insane desolation, humiliated humanity, impossibility of make oneself understood and anguish of the man as estranged element in enemy territory. Leitmotiv is thirst after safety, represented as thirst after the home.

POLAND, No End, Krystolf Kieslowski, 1985
It’s 1982: Poland is under martial law, and Solidarity is banned. Ulla, a translator working on Orwell, suddenly loses her husband, Antek, an attorney. She is possessed by her grief, and Antek continues to appear to her. She seeks to free herself in her work, in her relationship with her son, in sex, and in hypnosis. In a subplot, Ulla refers the wife of one of her husband’s clients Darek, a jailed Solidarity strike organizer to Labrador, a world-weary, aging attorney, who works to free Darek by various political manipulations and psychological ploys.

AUSTRIA, Dog Days, Ulrich Seidl, 2001
In a suburb of Vienna during some hot summer days: A teacher who is in bondage to a sleazy pimp, a very importunate hitchhiker, a private detective on the run for some car vandals, a couple with a serious marriage problem and an old man, whose wife died long before on the search for some sexual entertainment live their lives while their lifelines cross from time to time.

SWITZERLAND, Dans La Ville Blanche, Alain Tanner, 1983
A Swiss sailor jumps ship in Lisbon, tired of the noisy engine room, the ship “a floating factory of crazy people.” He rents a room and does little. He writes letters to his lover, describing the whiteness of the city, the solitude and the silence. He sends his love and emptiness; she replies with love and confusion. He sends movies from his 8mm camera. Then he becomes friendly with Rosa, a chambermaid, and soon it’s a love affair. He continues to send letters and movies home. His Swiss lover is hurt and angry; she sends an ultimatum.

GERMANY, Young Toerless, Volker Schlondorff, 1966
At a boarding school in the pre-war Austro-Hungarian Empire, a pair of students torture one of their fellow classmates, Basini, who has been caught stealing money from one of the two. The two decide that rather than turn Basini in to the school authorities, they will punish him themselves and proceed to torture, degrade, and humiliate the boy, with ever-increasing sadistic delight. As each day passes, the two boys are able to justify harsher treatment than previously given. Torless is a passive member of the group but observes rather than participates and frustrates the tormentors by dryly analyzing their behavior.

DENMARK, In Your Hands, Annette Olesen, 2004
In Your Hands is a serious and thought-provoking film looking at faith, love, motherhood and the roles of women. It sets up the two heroines as opposites – Anna, the holy, dark-haired spiritual advisor, isolated by the dark robes and Elizabethan ruff of her office; Kate, the sinner, blonde, always in cream and white, with no official status, the lowest of the low, and yet with more natural authority than Anna, with all her intellectual understanding, can imagine. We see how awkwardly Anna moves to comfort Marion, while Kate touches people much more naturally, despite her reserve, and also offers practical assistance when Marion needs help. But Anna is happy enough in her role, growing into it gradually, reaching out to the prisoners one by one, until the unthinkable happens and she finds out that she is pregnant.

FINLAND, Calamari Union, Aki Kaurismaki, 1985
Arriving in the “extreme centre of the city,” the permanently chain-smoking eighteen quickly splits up into smaller groupings of ones, twos and three – and then their adventures begin, most of them ending in death. But in the mildly stylised, monochrome world of Calamari Union (a title which, predictably in such a too-cool-for-school venture, is never explained or even once mentioned), death need not necessarily be the end…

SWEDEN, Simple Minded Murderer, Hans Alfredsen, 1982
The feeble-minded Sven’s mother dies and he gets work as a farm-hand at the rich, affluent Hoeglund’s farm. He has to work without pay and sleeps together with the cows. He meets the disabled Anna who is the first one to treat him as an adult. One day he has had enough of Hoeglund’s maltreatment and moves in with Anna’s family.

NORWAY, Bothersome Man, Jens Lien, 2006
Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment – even a wife. But before long, Andreas notices that something is wrong. Andreas makes an attempt to escape the city, but he discovers there’s no way out. Andreas meets Hugo, who has found a crack in a wall in his cellar. Beautiful music streams out from the crack. Maybe it leads to “the other side”? A new plan for escape is hatched.

ICELAND, Noi Albinoi, Dagur Kari, 2003
A wonderboy and drop-out on an Icelandic village scale, Noi (17), dreams of escaping from his remote fjord with the girl from the filling station. Noi (17) drifts through life in a remote fjord in northern Iceland. In the winter, the fjord is completely cut off from the outside world, encircled by terrifying mountains under a thick layer of snow. Noi dreams of escaping from this white prison, together with Iris, a city girl who works at the local filling station. But Noi’s clumsy attempts to escape don’t get him anywhere, and only get out of hand.

HOLLAND, Antonia’s Line, Marleen Gorris, 1995
This Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film embarks on a fanciful, magical exploration of the life of a strong-minded, nonconforming Dutch woman and her descendants. As the story begins, the… This Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film embarks on a fanciful, magical exploration of the life of a strong-minded, nonconforming Dutch woman and her descendants. As the story begins, the elderly Antonia is convinced that she is going to die that very day. With the end approaching, she reflects for the last time on her long, fruitful life. The film then flashes back to the end of World War II, when the 40-year-old Antonia returned to the small farming community where she grew up. With her teenage daughter Danielle in tow, and without a husband, Antonia intends to start a new life. Before long, she has become a successful farmer and an integral part of the village, although she challenges the strict customs so loved by many residents. In the process, she touches the lives of everyone around her.

BELGIUM, Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna, Chantal Akerman, 1978
Anna (Aurore Clement) is a film director whose job takes her all over western Europe. In each place she either already has some intimate connection, or readily makes one. People seem drawn to her, but inevitably insist on sharing their inmost secrets and discontents with her, despite her obvious and profound lack of interest in these revelations. This does not deter Anna from continuing to meet people, and she genuinely connects with them occasionally, as when she sees her mother briefly in Brussels.

FRANCE, Judex, Georges Franju, 1963
Favraux, an unscrupulous banker, receives a threatening note, signed by “Judex”, demanding that he pay back the people he has swindled. He refuses, and apparently dies after a midnight toast at his masked ball. However, he is only drugged by Judex and locked away. Judex spares his life when the banker’s widowed daughter, Jacqueline, rejects the inheritance. Meanwhile Diana Monti, the former governess, kidnaps Jacqueline to try to get the banker’s money. But Judex is hot on her trail.

ITALY, Fists In His Pockets, Marco Bellocchio 1965
Alessandro, a young epileptic with paranoid inclinations, decides to relieve Augusto, the only sound brother, from the burden of a numerous family plagued with hereditary diseases. After a first aborted attempt, the dreadful series of accidents/murders is started by pushing the blind mother into a ravine. Then comes the turn of Leone, the idiotic brother. Will Alessandro be able to bring to completion his obsessive project ?

SPAIN, the Hunt, Carlos Saura, 1966
The Hunt is an ugly piece of work with the visceral authenticity of a snuff movie. While the Hollywood film culture is driven by the Gun Drama, this is the only film I’ve ever seen that truly deserves to be in the genre. The four men are defined by their guns: Jose and Paco, vets, businessmen, uneasy friends, use double-barreled shotguns, their chambers sheathed in silver plating, the ornate scrolls like the new-found pedigree of their wealth. Luis, vet, the business partner of Jose and science fiction aficionado, has a sniper rifle, its telescopic site clearly designed for targeting humans, not rabbits… aliens, not Spaniards. And young Enrique is armed with his father’s pistol, a German Luger from the Civil War…. Like all exercises in human realism, the humour is in the bizarre, the madness in the detail.

PORTUGAL, Abraham Valley, Manoel de Oliveira, 1993
Ema is a very attractive but innocent girl, so pretty that cars crash in her presence. Young marries Dr. Carlo Paiva, who she is not attracted to, but is her father’s friend. They move to the Valley of Abraham. Carlo loves her, but decides to sleep in a separate room, to avoid waking Ema when he has to return late at night. With time she begins to feel unhappy about her marriage so, with all the freedom she has, she takes a lover.

IRELAND, I Went Down, Paddy Breathnach, 1997
Fresh out of prison, Git rescues a former best friend (now living with Git’s girlfriend) from a beating at the hands of loan sharks. He’s now in trouble with the mob boss, Tom French, who sends Git to Cork with another debtor, Bunny Kelly, to find a guy named Frank Grogan, and take him to a man with a friendly face at a shack across a bog. It’s a tougher assignment than it seems: Git’s a novice, Bunny’s prone to rash acts, Frank doesn’t want to be found (and once he’s found, he has no money), and maybe Tom’s planning to murder Frank, which puts Git in a moral dilemma.

NORTHERN IRELAND, Elephant, Alan Clarke, 1980
A depiction of a series of violent killings in Northern Ireland with no clue as to exactly who is responsible.

WALES, Sleep Furiously, Gideon Koppel, 2008
Set in a small farming community in mid Wales, a place where Koppel’s parents – both refugees – found a home. This is a landscape and population that is changing rapidly as small scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. Much influenced by his conversations with the writer Peter Handke, the film maker leads us on a poetic and profound journey into a world of endings and beginnings; a world of stuffed owls, sheep and fire.

SCOTLAND, My Childhood, Bill Douglas, 1972
The first part of Bill Douglas’ influential trilogy harks back to his impoverished upbringing in early-’40s Scotland. Cinema was his only escape – he paid for it with the money he made from returning empty jam jars – and this escape is reflected most closely at this time of his life as an eight-year-old living on the breadline with his half-brother and sick grandmother in a poor mining village.

ENGLAND, This Sporting Life, Lindsay Anderson, 1963
In Northern England in the early 1960s, Frank Machin is mean, tough and ambitious enough to become an immediate star in the rugby league team run by local employer Weaver. Machin lodges with Mrs Hammond, whose husband was killed in an accident at Weaver’s, but his impulsive and angry nature stop him from being able to reach her as he would like. He becomes increasingly frustrated with his situation, and this is not helped by the more straightforward enticements of Mrs Weaver.