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Foreign Films New to View September 2022 |
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Apples
(Greek) Amidst a worldwide pandemic that causes sudden amnesia, middle-aged Aris finds himself enrolled in a recovery program designed to help unclaimed patients build new identities. Prescribed daily tasks on cassette tapes so he can create new memories and document them on camera, Aris slides back into ordinary life, meeting Anna, a woman who is also in recovery. Through images deadpan, strange and surreal, Greek writer-director Christos Nikou posits a beguiling reflection on memory, identity, and loss, exploring how a society might handle an irreversible epidemic through one man's story of self-discovery. Are we the sum of the images we compile and display of ourselves, or are we something richer, and deeper?
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Baby Assassins
(Japanese) Two high school girls receive orders from upper management to get "real" jobs, become roommates and blend into normal society. They also happen to be highly skilled assassins who don't like each other. After an unfortunate run-in with the violent Yakuza, they quickly learn they must band together to survive an epic fight for their lives.
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Faya Dayi
(Amharic) A sublime work of personal vision, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic documentary immersion in the world of Ethiopia's Oromo community, a place where one commodity khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the influence of the drug itself, Faya Dayi unfurls as intoxicating, trance state cinema, capturing intimate moments in the existence of everyone from the harvesters of the crop to people lost in its narcotic haze to a desperate but determined younger generation searching for an escape from the region's political strife. The director's exquisite monochrome cinematography each frame a masterpiece sculpted from light and shadow and the film's time-bending, elliptical editing create a ravishing sensory experience that hovers between consciousness and dreaming.
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Fire in the Mountains
(Hindi) In northern India, a breathtakingly beautiful Himalayan community attracts tourists by commingling South Asian and Swiss Alps aesthetics. One local woman competes with her neighbors for business while battling the strictures of patriarchy, a local infrastructure from hell, and religious superstitions. She saves money, uses feminine wiles to subvert the corrupt powers-that-be, and piggy-backs her son up and down the mountainside to medical appointments with condescending doctors.
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Lost Illusions
(French) An aspiring poet joins a cynical team of journalists in nineteenth-century Paris. When he agrees to write rave reviews for bribes, achieving material success at the expense of his conscience, and soon discovers that the written word can be an instrument of both beauty and deceit in this sumptuous adaptation of Honore de Balzac's epic novel, Lost Illusions.
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My Donkey, My Love & I
(French) Antoinette, a schoolteacher, is looking forward to her long planned summer holiday with her married lover Vladimir, the father of one of her pupils. When she learns that Vladimir has to cancel because his wife organized a surprise hiking vacation, Antoinette decides to follow their tracks, accompanied by a protective donkey named Patrick.
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Serial Killer 1
(French) Franck is an eager rookie homicide squad inspector. When a woman is found with her throat cut, he shrewdly unearths parallels between previously unrelated cases. Before he knows it, Franck is caught up in an eight-year obsessive hunt for Serial Killer 1, a man whose very existence is questioned by others. Loosely based on the investigation into real-life murderer Guy Georges, aka the Beast of the Bastille.
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Harford County Public Library
1221-A Brass Mill Rd Belcamp, Maryland 21017 410-273-5600
hcplonline.org
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