World Cinema

World Cinema

A selection of acclaimed dramas from around the world.

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World Cinema
  • A Coffee in Berlin

    Directed by Jan Ole Gerster • Drama • With Tom Schilling, Friederike Kempter • 2014 • 88 minutes

    Jan Ole Gerster’s wry and vibrant feature debut A Coffee in Berlin, which swept the 2013 German Oscar Awards, paints a day in the life of Niko, a twenty-something college dropout going nowhere fast. ...

  • Helen

    Directed by Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor • Drama • With Annie Townsend • 2008 • 79 minutes

    An 18 year old girl called Joy has gone missing. Another girl called Helen is a few weeks away from leaving her care home. Helen is asked to ‘play’ Joy in a police reconstruction that will retrace Joy’s la...

  • Beanpole

    Directed by Kantemir Balagov • Drama • With Viktoria Miroshnichenko, Vasilisa Perelygina, Andrey Bykov • 2019 • 137 minutes

    In post-WWII Leningrad, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), intensely bonded after fighting side by side as an...

  • The Pencil

    Directed by Natalya Nazarova • Drama • With Vladimir Mishukov, Nadezhda Gorelova, Kirill Veselov • 2019 • 92 minutes

    Antonina, an artist from Saint Petersburg, follows her husband, a political prisoner, to the deep north province of Russia. As she starts teaching art in a local school, she finds...

  • Tall As the Baobab Tree

    Directed by Jeremy Teicher • Drama • With Dior Ka, Oumoul Ka • 2012 • 82 minutes

    Coumba and her little sister Debo are the first to leave their family’s remote African village, where meals are prepared over open fires and water is drawn from wells, to attend school in the bustling city. But when...

  • Maya (Mia Hansen-Løve)

    Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve • Drama • With Roman Kolinka, Aarshi Banerjee • 2018 • 107 minutes

    December 2012. Two French reporters are released after months of captivity in Syria. Gabriel, just shy of 30, heads to his childhood home in Goa, India, to recover. There, he meets Maya.

  • When I'm Done Dying

    Directed by Nisan Dag • Drama • With Oktay Çubuk, Hayal Köseoglu, Ushan Çakir • 2020 • 97 minutes

    FEHMI, a 19-year-old aspiring rapper from a rough neighborhood of Istanbul, is addicted to bonzai, a cheap and deadly drug, jeopardizing his dreams of becoming a successful rapper. When Fehmi crosse...

  • Eden is West (Costa-Gavras)

    Directed by Costa-Gavras • Drama • With Riccardo Scamarcio, Odysseas Papaspiliopoulos, Léa Wiazemsky • 2009 • 110 minutes

    Handsome and resourceful Elias flees as a refugee to Western Europe, which he sees as Eden. A drama with humor centered around the illegal immigrants living in the EU.

    "The ...

  • Wood and Water

    Directed by Jonas Bak • Drama • With Anke Bak, Patrick Lo • 2021 • 79 minutes

    With seamless grace, shooting on 16 mm, and underscored by a soundtrack from Brian Eno, German director Jonas Bak moves from the tall spires of the Black Forest to the teeming skyscrapers of Hong Kong in his tranquil, ...

  • Crystal Swan

    Directed by Darya Zhuk • Drama • With Alina Nasibullina, Ivan Mulin • 2018 • 93 minutes

    Set a few years after Belarus gained independence in 1990, this vibrant debut feature follows the path of young Evelina, who dreams of moving to Chicago in order to pursue her passion for house music. However...

  • Adela

    Directed by Adolfo Alix, Jr. • Drama • With Anita Linda, Joem Bascon, Jason Abalos • 2008 • 90 minutes

    It is Adela’s 80th birthday. A former radio personality, she lives on her own in the slums of Manila. Adela is surrounded by a sea of humanity and with it their problems, successes, and trivial...

  • Stefan Zweig

    Directed by Maria Schrader • Drama • With Josef Hader, Barbara Sukowa, Tómas Lemarquis, Cristina do Rego • 2016 • 106 minutes

    This emotionally powerful film explores the painful dilemma of whether to speak out or remain silent in the face of tyranny. Stefan Zweig: Farewell To Europe tells the st...

  • A Film About Couples

    Directed by Oriol Estrada, Natalia Cabral • Drama • With Oriol Estrada, Natalia Cabral, Lia Estrada Cabral, Carlos M. Matos, Homer Mora • 2021 • 89 minutes

    Directed by Miriam Lies’ award-winning team, Natalia Cabral y Oriol Estrada, A Film About Couples is equal parts a candid exposition of the ...

  • Zero Point

    Directed by Mihkel Ulk • Drama • With Tambet Tuisk, Märt Pius, Brigitte Susanne Hunt • 2014 • 114 minutes

    After being denounced as an outcast in school and frightened away from home by his mother's developing schizophrenia, there is no other way out for Johannes but to start improving his life b...

  • Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia

    Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • Drama • With Oleg Yankovsky, Erland Josephson, Domiziana Giordano
    • 2013 • 125 minutes

    Nostalghia is Andrei Tarkovsky's brooding late masterpiece, a darkly poetic vision of exile. It was the first of his features to be made outside of Russia, the home to which he...

  • Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe)

    Directed by Oliver Laxe • Drama • With Amador Arias • 2019 • 85 minutes

    Following Mimosas, Oliver Laxe's third feature brings us to his ancestral home of Galicia. Here, in this remote Spanish region, where the grandeur of nature is both beautiful and terrifying, Laxe unfolds a story of the uncon...

  • The Girl, the Mother and the Demons

    Directed by Suzanne Osten • Drama • With Esther Quigley, Maria Sundbom Lörelius • 2016 • 0 minutes

    Siri, a single and psychotic mother, locks herself and her daughter Ti in their apartment where Siri’s demons are in charge. Ti can neither see nor hear the demons that have clearly taken control o...

  • The Wonders (Alice Rohrwacher)

    Directed by Alice Rohrwacher • Drama • With Alba Rohrwacher, Maria Alexandra Lungu, Monica Bellucci • 2014 • 111 minutes

    The Wonders is an enchanting drama centered around a family of beekeepers who are struggling to make ends meet on their farm nestled deep in the Italian countryside. While the...

  • Nobuhiko Obayashi's War Trilogy

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    In the last decade of his long and prolific career, Nobuhiko Obayashi (1938-2020) —best-known in the U.S. as the filmmaker behind the cult hit House (1977)—wrote and directed a trio of deeply personal and formally audacious films that confronted Japan’s wartime past.

    Made in the wake of the Grea...

  • Red Like the Sky

    Directed by Cristiano Bortone • Drama • With Paolo Sassanelli, Luca Capriotti • 2007 • 96 minutes

    A nearly sightless boy is sent to a school for blind children, where he secretly discovers the possibilities of the recorded sound. Based on the true childhood experiences of renowned sound editor M...

  • Summer 1993

    Directed by Carla Simón • Drama • With Laia Artigas, Paula Robles • 2017 • 96 minutes

    In Carla Simon’s touching autobiographical film, six-year-old Frida looks on in silence as the last objects from her recently deceased mother’s apartment in Barcelona are placed in boxes. Although her aunt, unc...

  • Dachra

    Directed by Abdelhamid Bouchnak • Drama • With Yassmine Dimassi, Hela Ayed, Aziz Jebali • 2018 • 114 minutes

    Ever since she was discovered naked and near-dead decades ago, Mongia has been institutionalized, with a tendency to bite her nurses. Grisly, frightening, and stuffed with howling thrills...

  • Mysteries of Lisbon

    Directed by Raul Ruiz • Drama • With Adriano Luz • 2011 • 257 minutes

    A masterful adaptation of the nineteenth-century Portuguese novel evokes the complex intertwined narratives of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. The core story centers on Joao, the bastard child of an ill-fated romance between ...

  • Father

    Directed by Srdan Golubovic • Drama • With Goran Bogdan, Boris Isakovic, Nada Sargin, Muharem Hamzic • 2020 • 120 minutes

    In small town Serbia, a day laborer and father of two, is ordered to give up his children to social services after poverty and hunger drive his wife to commit a desperate act...