A scene from From Ground Zero.
All We Imagine as Light: Written and directed by Payal Kapadia, this is a truly amazing film about two young and one not so young woman navigating life in modern India. It qualifies for the best compliment I can give a film—it says so much while seeming to do almost nothing at all—and the Cannes Jury agrees with me, even if India’s Oscar nominating committee did not.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World: An ambitious and often hilarious film from writer/director Radu Jude which satirizes corporate greed while intercutting the story of a overworked production assistant (Ilinca Manolache) in present-day Bucharest with footage from a 1981 film about a female taxi driver (Angela merge mai departe by Lucian Bratu).
Flow: A dialogue-free animated film from Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis about a group of animals that must find a way to survive a flood that is rapidly destroying their habitat. This is about as pure as storytelling can get, and it works all the better because the animals are nothing like the Disney creatures we’ve come to expect in such films.
From Ground Zero: Structurally the most creative film on this list, From Ground Zero is composed of 22 short films from 22 Palestinian directors, using fiction, documentary, and animation to explore life in Gaza in the midst of the so-called Israel-Hamas War.
The Girl With the Needle: The black and white cinematography of Michal Dymek forms the real heart of Magnus von Horn’s grim tale of post-World War I Copenhagen, which captures both the glamorous world of people born to own factories and the grim lives of those who are maimed in war or become pregnant without a husband on hand. To put it another way, his visuals contrast the worlds of those with many choices and those who may be lucky to have one, in a time when the “equality of condition” social welfare system lies far in the future.
Green Border: This epic film from Agnieszka Holland intertwines three stories that exemplify the complexity of international migration issues, particularly when a dictator like Alexander Lukashenko decides to stir the pot. The most gripping is that of an immigrant family from Syria hoping to cross into the EU, while those of a young Polish border guard who, like his compatriots, sometimes behaves appallingly, and a group of Polish activists who are trying to help the immigrants, create balance at a time when it’s tempting to pick one side and be done with it.
Kneecap: Rich Peppiatt’s first narrative feature is as exuberantly messy and defiantly anarchic as the music of the Irish rap band whose origin story it purports to tell (the band is real but I won’t vouch for the truth value of every detail in this film). It also exemplifies the attitude that every word of Irish spoken is a bullet for Irish freedom, even if the speakers are notably imperfect human beings.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig: It’s no secret that director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison for making this film (he escaped to Germany and was able to attend its Cannes premiere). That intrusion of real life gives an extra layer of meaning to the story of a man (Missagh Zareh) recently appointed to a judgeship on the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, only to learn that he’s expected to rubber-stamp the judgments of his superiors rather than make his own decisions.
Santosh: The first Hindi-language film chosen by the UK as its Best International Picture nominee for the Oscars, Sandhya Suri’s film features Shahana Goswami as a young widow who inherits her husband’s police constable job and is soon tasked with investigating the murder of a teenage Dalit girl. If the men in charge don’t take Santosh or the victim seriously, an experienced female officer (Sunita Rajwar) does, and Santosh grows into her new identity even as the odds remain stacked against her.
Touch: In the early days of the COVID pandemic, Icelandic widower Kristofer (Egill Olafsson) receives some unwelcome news: he’s in the early stages of dementia and shouldn’t put off anything he wants to do. Throwing caution to the wind, he decides to track down a Japanese woman he was once in love with, a journey that takes him to the UK and then to Japan, with the clock ticking before international travel becomes impossible or he becomes incapable of independent action. | Sarah Boslaugh
*No, I don’t care if a picture was chosen by its country as the Oscar nominee or not, because that process is too often based on politics rather than artistic quality. Two cases in point: All We Imagine as Light and Green Border.
