Films from the 2019 edition

Willy the 1st

Winner of the Prix d’Ornano for Best French Debut as judged by foreign film journalists in France, Ludovic Boukherma, Zoran Boukherma, Marielle Gautier, and Hugo P. Thomas’ dramatic comedy is a...

Hands of a Mother

Winner of the Young German Cinema Award for Best Director as well as the Best Actor prize (for lead Andreas Döhler) at the Munich Film Festival, Florian Eichinger’s per...

Cetaceans

Subtle, funny, unpretentious, and completely charming, Florencia Percia’s debut is a warm comedy that starts from a basic premise and builds into a witty exploration of one woman’s desi...

Clean Up

Given its depth of feeling and precise visual style, it’s astounding to learn that Kwon Man-ki’s debut drama, Clean Up—which shared the Best Film award in the New Cu...

The Dragon Defense

First-time director Natalia Santa’s droll drama about three middle-aged men whose friendship centres on chess manages to draw trenchant parallels between the careworn lives of its protagonists and the sh...

Genesis

Probably the best Canadian film of 2018, Philippe Lesage’s audacious, double-focused coming-of-age drama follows the differing trajectories of Salinger-reading 16-year-old Guillaume (Théodore Pellerin, riveting) and his older, more hedonistic hal...

Holy Air

Writer-director-star Shady Srour’s alternately funny and compassionate satire tackles a subject you rarely see onscreen—the lives of modern Arab Christians scraping by in Israel—and it does so in a w...

The Line

Winner of the Best Director award at the 2017 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Peter Bebjak’s thriller is all about crossing ‘lines’—both physical and moral—and the tragic consequences for doing ...

Newton

India’s submission for the Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award in 2017, Amit V. Masurkar’s darkly comic political satire centres on Newton Kumar (Indian star Rajkummar Rao), an idealistic government cler...

Sicilian Ghost Story

When the hypnotic Sicilian Ghost Story opened the Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2017, it received a thunderous ten-minute standing ovation, and it is not hard to understand why. Based on a t...

That Trip We Took With Dad

Set amidst the turbulent events of 1968 in Eastern Europe—the crushing of the Prague Spring by the Russian Army, the consolidation of power by future Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu—write...

Volcano

‘It is total anarchy. If you get used to it, you’ll survive.’ So says the eccentric Vova (a deadpan Viktor Zhdanov) to our hero, city-bred interpreter Lukas (Serhiy Stepansky), after ...

Winter Flies

Two mismatched boys in a stolen Audi wend their way clear across the Czech Republic in Olmo Omerzu’s road movie, an alternately melancholic and uplifting tale that won the Cz...