Year: 2001
Director: Joel Hopkins
Country of origin: United Kingdom
In “Jump Tomorrow” we witness the tragicomic journey of George, a young Nigerian man about to be engaged in a marriage arranged by his family. At the airport where he is supposed to meet his would-be partner, George meets Alicia, a Latina who flirts with him and invites him to a party, and Gerard, a disconsolate Frenchman who has just had a marriage proposal rejected, characters who will make George question his decisions on his way to Niagara Falls, where he is supposed to meet his future wife. Winner of a BAFTA award in the best director category and nominated for five awards at the British Independent Film Awards.
Original title: L’imbalsamatore
Year: 2002
Director: Matteo Garrone
Country: Italy
In “The Embalmer” — a film inspired by an Italian criminal case and winner of 16 awards — a lonely taxidermist and his youthful new assistant become involved in a morbid professional and personal relationship, aggravated by the arrival of a woman. This is a strong and intense film, unequivocally noir, where cynicism feeds in any way the development of the story and characters that are paradoxically innocent. Deliberately eerie and disturbing, always accompanied by the shadow of death, this movie transforms the current events in a romantic-aesthetic dimension based on the axiom between love and death.
Source: partially adapted from What The Movie.
Original Title: Furueru shita (震える舌)
Year: 1980
Director: Yoshitarô Nomura
Country of origin: Japan
Trismus is not an easy movie to watch. Its plot shows the worsening of a tetanus infection that afflicts five-year-old Masako. After cutting her finger while playing, the girl and her parents are thrown into a hospital horror. The development of the infection is accompanied by the anxiety and violence of the medical procedures needed to treat it. Cuts, blood transfusions, probes, injections and extractions are all concentrated in a small, dark hospital room, building an oppressive atmosphere that some compare to that of “The Exorcist”. Family drama and body horror combine in this peculiar portrait of the hospital experience. Nominated for Japanese Academy Awards in eight categories, including best director and best leading actor.
Year: 2000
Director: Robert Lepage
Country of origin: Canada
Building on the philosophical idea that each of us inhabits a universe of possible worlds, we witness a man who seems to live in multiple realities, in each of which he encounters the same intriguing woman assuming different roles. Based on the play by mathematician John Mighton, Possible Worlds is a film that will appeal to fans of science fiction and philosophy by addressing questions about existence and consciousness. What would it be like to live in a mental world, without the constraints of materiality? What would emotions be like in such a world? What would be the meaning of love in such conditions? This Canadian feature film was awarded best editing and best production design at the Genie Awards and had Tilda Swinton nominated for best leading actress.
Original title: Carmín Tropical
Year: 2014
Director: Rigoberto Pérezcano
Country of origin: Mexico
In the Mexican region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, muxes are like a third gender, neither men nor women, but people of the male sex who assume at least one of the roles attributed to women, either by wearing women’s clothing, homosexuality, or by temporarily or permanently assuming the identity of a woman. The plot of the film revolves around the muxe character, Mabel, who returns to her native town when she learns that her old friend, Daniela, also a muxe, has been murdered. There, in the city of Juchitan, we follow a story of memories, romance and thriller. The film won Best Original Screenplay at the Ariel Awards, Mexico’s biggest film awards, and Best Feature Film at the Morelia International Film Fest.
Original title: Nelly & Mr. Arnaud
Year: 1995
Director: Claude Sautet
Country of origin: France
Although the film builds on a recurring trope in French cinema, the relationship between an older man and a young woman, “Nelly and Mr. Arnaud” distances itself from the typical narratives about male fetishes and seems to revolve around the question: what are relationships made of? The spaces here are the coffeehouses, parties and well-furnished residences of a distinctly bourgeois Paris, in which the relationships of its various characters develop in a way in which nothing is wasted, not a single word, gesture or touch seems meaningless. The film has a cast made up of well-known names in French cinema, such as Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Serrault and Michael Lonsdale. It won Best Actor and Best Director at the César Awards, the main French film awards.
Original title: Aos Teus Olhos
Year: 2017
Director: Carolina Jabor
Country of origin: Brazil
Enriched subtitles
In “Liquid Truth”, a single point of view is imposed with no concern for contradiction: swimming teacher Rubens allegedly kissed a student in the changing room. The story is told by the student to his mother, taken to the administration of the club where Rubens works, shared on social networks by outraged parents and turned into a police case, originating a network of versions and their consequences for those affected. Convictions are called into question all the time, in an age permeated by circumstantial facts, post-truth and fake news. Winner of four categories at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival and nominated for the Brazilian Cinema Grand Prix in the best director category.
Source: translated and adapted from O Globo.
Year: 2016
Director: Ann Marie Fleming
Country of origin: Canada
Rosie is of Chinese and Iranian descent, but she is disconnected from her family history — her mother is dead and her father abandoned the family long ago. Instead, Rosie writes poems in an ode to Paris, her dream city, but when she is invited to present her work at a poetry festival in Shiraz, Iran, she meets poets who expand her ideas about the art form and about herself. Rosie listens as diverse artists share personal experiences and national histories through their poetry, animated in a different styles to reflect the variety of life on display. Though many of the characters in “Window Horses” share a lively Cubist design, Rosie is the most sparingly-drawn figure onscreen, a stick figure with two small slants for eyes, but as the character learns more about her personal and poetic origins, her minimalist frame absorbs the weight of a rich, complex history.
Source: adapted from The New York Times.
Original title: 極道黒社会
Year: 1997
Director: Takashi Miike
Country of origin: Japan
Yûji is a former yakuza now living in exile in Taipei, where he ekes out a living performing hits for a local crime boss. A coldly efficient killer, he has just one superstition, that it is bad luck to go out in the rain. The scenes in Taipei back streets and market areas, often shot with a hand-held camera in unhurried takes, really capture the feel of a particularly unglamorous corner of this metropolitan city, one whose frequent downpours play like expressionist reflections of Yûji’s melancholia, enhanced by his rainfall superstition exaggerated by a casual drug habit and his failure to connect with a city that bears only a surface resemblance to the Tokyo of his past. This isn’t his home, this isn’t his language and these aren’t his people, what makes them easier to kill.
Source: adapted from Cine Outsider.
Year: 1979
Director: Richard Pearce
Country of origin: United States
Enriched subtitles
In 1910, a determined young widow packs up her daughter and moves out to the unsettled frontier lands of Wyoming to take a job as the housekeeper on a ranch. Everything in this movie affirms life. Perhaps that is why Heartland can also be so unblinking in its consideration of death, and this movie contains several scenes that can shock some audiences because of their forthright realism. We see a pig slaughtered, a calf birthed, cattle skinned, and a half-dead horse left out in the blizzard because there is simply nothing to feed it. It contains countless small details of farming life that sometimes work better than dialogue to flesh out the characters. “Heartland” is a big, robust, joyous movie about people who make other movie heroes look tentative.
Source: adapted from Roger Ebert.
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