March Around the World
10 foreign language films from a decade of film festival travels.
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I found a natural tie-in with the “March Around the World” challenge that usually sweeps through Letterboxd, the social movie app/site you should all be on, this month. The idea is to watch a movie from a different country each day … or at least watch something made outside the U.S.
Here are ten recommendations of mine from a decade spent on the festival circuit trying to travel the world through film:
Atlantics (Senegal), Netflix
“Every love story is a ghost story,” reads the slogan for Mati Diop’s beguiling supernatural romance Atlantics. What passion brings together in the connection between Ada and Souleiman cannot be torn apart — not by nature, not by society, not by economics. Though mystical and mysterious, Diop’s first feature film never loses the pulse of the beating heart bursting through its chest. This is a sincere, stirring work that takes some unconventional routes to arrive there.
Chevalier (Greece), rental
If you’ve enjoyed the off-kilter stylings of Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite, The Lobster), then why not get deeper into the “Greek Weird Wave” with his contemporary Athina Rachel Tsangari? This dry comedy burlesques hyper-masculinity with a silly maritime game among a group of Greek sailors. There are no set rules, but the men decide to score themselves with positive or negative points based on how an action, behavior, or trait strikes them as “manly.” Glorious chaos and absurdity ensues.
Lina from Lima (Peru), HBO Max (through 3/31)
You’ve almost certainly never seen a movie musical quite like Lina from Lima. The eponymous Lina is a migrant worker for a wealthy Chilean family whose inner life sees expression in the form of fantastical, Busby Berkeley-esque musical numbers. They’re both a reflection of the vibrancy that the outer world cannot see behind her servile role as well as an ironic contrast to the mundanity and miserableness of her occupational status. It’s a startlingly stylish debut from María Paz González, and I hope we’ll see more from her in the future.
Luzzu (Malta), Mubi and available to rent from various digital providers
This was my favorite movie from Sundance 2021, from a country that I only really knew existed because of Pete Buttigieg’s randomly proud proclamations of his heritage. Alex Camilleri displays a real knack for social realist storytelling as he follows fisherman Jesmark Scicluna, playing a lightly fictionalized version of himself on screen. Luzzu refers to his fishing vessel, a colorful wooden ship that represents the decadence of ages past that has begun to feel more like a burden than a blessing. Camilleri wrings exquisite tension from Jesmark’s conundrum that drives him toward increasingly desperate ends: honoring his family’s legacy while needing to provide for his family in the present.
Rams (Iceland), Tubi (free with ads)
In some old Hollywood boardroom, someone decided that comedy doesn’t travel well because so much of it derives from culturally specific reference points. That may be true, but many things can cut across those boundaries! It’s easy to recognize Grímur Hákonarson’s Rams as the product of the country’s bleak, icy terrain. But the dark comedy that stems from a potential flock-decimating infection sweeping through a valley’s sheep population resonates because it taps into something we can all understand about the power and peril of community.
Synonyms (Israel), Criterion Channel
Perhaps the most fitting title for the ethos of this list, Synonyms follows a young and impressionable Israeli as he flees his homeland for Paris and attempts to immerse himself in the French language. Nadav Lapid’s film remains fixated on the arbitrariness of borders and nationality given that every country’s culture is but a thin façade over a well of jingoistic nationalism. This realization for Yoav, electrifyingly portrayed by newcomer Tom Mercier, should make him feel at home anywhere. Instead, it drives him into confusion and despair because he feels as if there is simply nowhere in the world for anyone like him.
The Sleepwalkers (Argentina), Amazon Prime Video
This is not your average mother-daughter tale. The Sleepwalkers feels downright combustible as the friction between the high-strung Luisa and her freewheeling offspring Ana threatens to spark during a summer trip. Paula Hernández’s film might initially present itself as just another play on a familiar dynamic, but there’s always this nagging sense during the film that these two characters represent something a little more than just themselves. They’re representations of intergenerational womanhood, each echoing the other’s journey in unexpected ways. And when Luisa can’t stop what she should know is coming for Ana, it’s devastating to see that sense of utter failure play out on her face.
The Tribe (Ukraine), IMDb TV (free with ads through Amazon Prime Video)
The topical pick! Don’t expect this to make you feel any better than doomscrolling headlines about the war in Ukraine. This is, I kid you not, maybe the bleakest and darkest movie I’ve ever seen. But if you’re willing to venture into The Tribe knowing that, you’ll almost certainly appreciate the verve of Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s filmmaking. The movie takes place as the innocent Sergei enters a school for the deaf only to find a dangerous criminal element operating within the walls. The gambit: there are no subtitles to translate their sign-language conversations. While we can’t hear the characters in the film, we can still understand them. The miracle of cinema.
The Whistlers (Romania), Hulu
One of these days I’ll need to do a full deep dive and/or explainer on the Romanian New Wave, one of the most exciting national movements sweeping through contemporary cinema. But if you’re just looking to dip your toes in the water of what the country has to offer, I’d start with Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Whistlers. Picture a James Bond movie warped through the bonkers sensibilities of your kooky linguistics professor, and that’s more or less what you get here. Porumboiu, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, has a real knack for playful riffs of genre tropes that make him the most accessible and entertaining of the bunch.
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Georgia), Mubi and available to rent from various digital providers
If formal inventiveness is something you seek in a movie, then clear the 150 minutes to watch this stunner from Georgia (the country, not the peach state). I’m fully convinced that Alexandre Koberidze’s city symphony What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is the kind of movie that we’ll hear directors in 10-15 years describe as the thing they saw in the film school that made them want to make movies. At its core, this is a story of two young lovers meeting in the city of Kutaisi who must defy fate to build upon their instant connection. But Koberidze keeps opening and expanding his film outward, exploring how the great urban sprawl both instigates and inhibits these chance encounters. Few films so effortlessly capture how a place can make a person feel both hopelessly isolated and hopefully connected all at once.
Happy travels — I mean, viewing!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall