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In the age of streaming, the world is flat – screen size – travel to distant places is just a monthly subscription and a click away. We’ve traveled the world of options and selected the best new international movies for you to watch.
‘bint’
After laughing, crying and biting my nails while watching “Binti,” I realized that it was tagged in the “kids” category on Amazon. Directed by Frederike Migom, this Belgian film achieves something rarely seen in American children’s cinema: It transforms the bleak real-life issues of racial inequality and immigration into a feel-good story that never belittles its audience. The beating, beating heart of this movie is 11-year-old Binti (played by a lively Bebel Tshiani Baloji), an undocumented Congolese immigrant living with her father in Belgium. A social media-obsessed tween with a sizable online following, culled with videos that put a glamorous spin on her precarious life.
When a police raid forces Binti and her father to flee their home with other undocumented immigrants, Binti’s paths cross with Elias (Mo Bakker), a white teenager trying to come to terms with her parents’ divorce. With the miraculous faith in humanity seen in children’s movies, Elias and his mother decide to take shelter in Binti and her father. This makeshift family, who soon emerges, plans a charity dance performance for an animal Elias adores. okapiAn endangered species related to the giraffe and endemic to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Warmth and comedy flow between these oddities, but when characters face the threat of deportation, Migom takes it with clear seriousness and ties it all together in a climax that is both realistic in its portrayal of an unjust world and optimistic about the potential of humans. – and especially children – to make things better.
‘Labor’
Stylish, gripping, and utterly surprising, “Workforce” unfolds in its first half as a gritty Kafkaesque drama about exploited workers. Francisco (Luis Alberti), a construction worker in Mexico City, tries to get compensation for his pregnant sister-in-law after losing his brother in a work accident and is thwarted by an apathetic and corrupt bureaucracy. Director David Zonana details the daily challenges of Francisco and his colleagues in simply rendered, Neorealist scenes. Not only do the men spend all day building a stately home that looks obscene in comparison to their cramped, leaky hut, they are also subjected to routine disgrace at work: long hours, missed pay, cuts for minor mistakes.
But midway, this slow-burning kitchen sink drama suddenly takes shape as a dark twist causes Francisco and his co-workers to take over the house and live in it with their families. The group’s deliberations and deliberations—and their surprise at the relative luxuries they now hold—are moving and riveting to watch. But as Francisco turns into a slippery, morally ambiguous figure, a restlessness persists and grows through everything. Zonana keeps her cards close to her chest until the end, turning a chilling critique of class inequalities and the corruption of capital into a tense thriller.
This Malayali superhero story starts with a real bang. In a small village in the southern Indian state of Kerala, a flood of lightning caused by a rare astronomical event strikes two men at the same time: Jaison (Tovino Thomas), a handsome young tailor who dreams of moving to America to find a job; and Shibu (Guru Somasundaram), an eccentric vagrant whose long-lost love has just returned to town. The film creates an intriguing mystery from the very first moment. Which of these two men is the superhero of the movie’s title (“minnal” means “lightning”), both of whom quickly produce blue phlegm and move objects with their minds? And possible teammates or foes?
In a clever narrative tactic, “Minnal Murali” doesn’t clarify these questions until at least an hour after the movie, but instead follows the two lead actors as they rise to power with equal empathy and intelligence. In obscene disguise, Jaison uses his newfound mega power to teach the town’s stupid, corrupt police a lesson, while Shibu protects his crush from lecherous men and robs a bank to help the woman’s sick daughter. Confusion and rivalry ensue when Jaison signs his antics under the name Minnal Murali, and the village assumes that Shibu’s escapes were made by the same masked man. In the end, the stakes rise, but for the most part, Basil Joseph’s movie feels more like a charming country comedy, not a superhero action movie. Featuring a unanimously fantastic cast, the film dazzles in the cute quirks of a small village and the humble aspirations that move even its strongest inhabitants.
‘grit’
“Gritt” is the pseudonym for Gry-Jeanette, the performance artist at the heart of Itonje Soimer Guttormsen’s film, but it can also be a reference to a quality that our stubborn, head-to-head heroine perhaps has too much. When we first meet Gritt, she is in New York with a Norwegian theater company as an assistant to an actress with Down syndrome whom she looks up to with jealousy and resentment. It’s the latest in Gritt’s efforts to break into the avant-garde arts scene, and it seems to hold some promise when a local theater director puts him in touch with a colleague in Oslo.
But, as we soon learned, Gritt has neither the resources (he has no stable home and lack of experience and no government benefits) nor the honesty to bring his lofty ideas to life. In Oslo, he takes an apprenticeship at The Theater of Cruelty and begins working on a project with local Syrian refugees, but only to cloud everything with bad decisions and selfish lies – a turnaround that eventually leads to some pursuits. With real-life artists from New York and Oslo looking like them, and with the frenetic, hand-held cinematography evoking reality television, “Gritt” itself can feel like performance art at times – a character portrait that captivates audiences with its highly ambiguous yet highly ambiguous appearance. The subject of arrest, played with perfect devotion by Birgitte Larsen.
Five Movies to Watch This Winter
‘Silent Fire’
The personal and the political are fascinatingly intertwined in Federico Atehortúa Arteaga’s meditative documentary essay. The director initially set out to make a film about what is considered the beginning of Colombian cinema: a reenactment for a photographic report of an assassination attempt on the country’s then-president, Rafael Reyes, in 1906. While she was working on this project, Atehortúa Arteaga’s mother developed a sudden case of mutism that doctors couldn’t explain. In “Mute Fire,” the director draws relational links between the two events through an inspiring exploration of performance, trauma, and the unspoken ways in which the public bears the weight of Colombia’s bloody wars bodily.
Using archive footage and home videos, Atehortúa Arteaga uncovers an investigation into the role images play in familial and historical memory. It masterfully combines a poetic voice-over with Thomas Edison’s early films to portray famous executions; the controversy surrounding one of the first films to be shot in Colombia, about the death of political leader Rafael Uribe Uribe; and The “false positives” scandal Containing thousands of innocent men and women killed by the Colombian military as war killings during the country’s recent internal conflict. Atehortúa Arteaga impressively demonstrates that war is fought with images as well as with weapons, and as these images continue over time, so do many of the wounds of war.
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