Foreign entries offer inviting views of issues
Not only was last year's audience favorite the memorable Irish film "Once," focusing on the refreshingly touching romance between a guitar-playing Dublin singer and a piano-playing girl from Eastern Europe, but the film is still delighting audiences all around the world.
And, when the awards were given at the end of last year's festival, not only were prizes given to approximately half a dozen foreign films, but the two top prizes went to a jaw-dropping documentary on corruption in Brazil and an intense feature film dealing with Mexicans being smuggled over the border.
So, what might you keep an eye on among this year's foreign offerings?
Take your pick: Among the 16 entries in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition are six films from Western and Eastern Europe, four from the Middle East, four from South and Central America, and two from Asia.
Sure to be provocative is the German film "The Wave." In an attempt to help his students understand Nazism — and fascism in general — a German high school teacher devises an unorthodox experiment that soon gets out of hand. And making this film even more intriguing is the fact that the novel on which the film was based didn't take place in Germany but at a high school in Palo Alto, Calif.
In the Israeli film "Strangers," viewers will find themselves emotionally involved in the chance encounter — and subsequent precarious relationship — between a Palestinian woman and an Israeli man whose lives intertwine during the World Cup finals in Berlin but then are further complicated when a new Israeli-Lebanese war breaks out.
"Perro Come Perro (Dog Eat Dog)" explores the griminess and violence of the Colombian crime world against a backdrop of voodoo and murder.
"Just Another Love Story," Denmark's offbeat, twisted and linearly fractured narrative, takes us on an uneasy but intriguing journey involving amnesia, self-reinvention and disturbing flashes of memory — something that no one does better than the Scandinavians.
But there are lighter films from around the world, such as the four existential yet charming stories that make up "I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster" from France, and the inventive allegorical comedy "Absurdistan," from Germany and Azerbaijan, in which the women of a water-starved village, after becoming exasperated by the inaction of their apathetic husbands, declare a strike: no water, no sex.
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