Week after week, in spite of a less-than-promising exhibition landscape, U.S. distributors release noteworthy international titles in a small number of theaters and/or on digital platforms for American audiences to access. Unfortunately, these films not in English and without any household names in their cast often struggle to find their audience amid the noise of mainstream Hollywood fare, even among those generally more adventurous than the average moviegoer. And with the increasingly limited resources at publications of all sizes, many of these productions face an uphill battle trying to land coverage.
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Now that we’ve crossed at the halfway point of 2024, we’ve put together a list of 20 films from around the world, with stateside releases between January and June, that fell through the cracks but merit seeking out.
Art College 1994
A portrait of the ideological earnestness that only youth can sustain, Chinese animated drama Art College 1994 features lofty debates on the meaning of art, Duchamp’s urinals, and selling out from the minds of two painting majors in their early 20s. Xiaojun listens to Nirvana, hates traditionalist art, and seems unwavering in his idealistic notions about creating without interest in fame or monetary gain. His best bud Rabbit has less virtuous aspirations. Their heartfelt exchanges brim with grand philosophical inquiries revealing them to be adrift while eager to be seen as defiant. But over the course of their final year in college, writer-director Liu Jian traces how life and all its variables dilute their rigid resolve, forcing them to reassess their once firm expectations. In turn, their female counterparts, Hong and Lili, two music students, worry about societal views on marriage, their career prospects, and the choices that will allow them the most freedom. For as much as their professors try to dissuade them from giving in to Western influence, the production design, showing a McDonald’s and billboards promoting Michael Jackson’s album Bad, evince globalization. Done in hand-drawn animation with limited character movement yet detailed backgrounds, Liu’s third feature is a dialogue-heavy but rewarding coming-of-age saga.
Banel & Adama
Banel (Khady Mane) fell in love with Adama (Mamadou Diallo) because he is not like the other men in their rural village. They listen to each other’s needs and fears. Their bond is genuine. Boasting a deft eye for creating ethereal frames, Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s lyrical Senegalese drama tracks how their plans for an idyllic life together, away from the impositions and intrusions of their religious relatives, become endangered. As consequence of his lineage, Adama is caught up between fulfilling his duty to the group by become chief and his wish to spend his life solely dedicated to Banel. A severe drought threatening everyone’s livelihoods and lives puts further pressure on the future of their marriage. The inscrutable expression on Mane’s face crystalizes Banel’s determination to defy the predetermined trajectory for women. Her quietly charged acting complements the potent magical realist flourishes that disorient, enthrall, and make the pair question if perhaps divine forces are in fact working against them. No simple solution will resolve this clash between chasing individualistic yearnings or doing what benefits the community. Can their love withstand the impetus of a relentless sandstorm, both metaphorically and literally?
Bye Bye Tiberias
Current events make Lina Soualem’s home movies from her childhood summers in Palestine during the early 1990s even more valuable, and sorrowful, now. Tapping into the most personal wounds in her family history, the director interviews her mother Hiam Abbass, a renowned actress, about this footage and photos of her hometown, Deir Hanna, a small Palestinian village. The memories contained within those images feature four generations of women, of whom Soualem was the first to be born abroad. In one early scene, Abbass reads one of her poems in Arabic and expresses how she hopes Soualem would study the mother tongue of her ancestors. Raised in Paris, the filmmaker can’t read nor write Arabic, which intensifies her heartache over being detached from her roots. The documentary functions as a lucid portrait of one family and a stirring reflection on the greater context of their displacement. The treasure trove of recorded moments from which they can string together stories about those better years are unavoidably coated with a painful truth. What’s been lost can’t be recovered, at least not with all the parts that made it what it was then.
The Breaking Ice
While visiting snow-covered Yanji, a Chinese city near the border with North Korea, well-off Shanghai finance worker Haofeng (Liu Haoran) befriends local tour guide Nana (Zhou Dongyu) and Xiao (Qu Chuxiao), a restaurant worker, after losing his cell phone. The young trio, all around the same age, indulge in drunken late nights, excursions to nearby sites, and the occasional heart-to-heart. Though one couldn’t exactly call them a throuple, the configuration of their love triangle is far more emotionally subdued and certainly less raunchy than Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También or Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Singaporean director Anthony Chen has a bright sensibility for orchestrating seemingly spontaneous events that organically peel the layers of his characters until we witness their most unguarded versions. The worries pertinent to their respective economic classes and their most intimate apprehensions float to the surface. Haofeng finds respite from his declining mental health in these impromptu, non-judgmental friendships. Nana refuses to revisit her past as a high-achieving athlete, while the less-worldly Xiao is fed up with feeling stuck. Chen turns what could appear as just a few days of leisure into a three-headed breakthrough.
Chronicles Of A Wandering Saint
Halfway through this delightfully inventive dramedy about the afterlife director Tomás Gómez Bustillo makes a bold choice that’s certain to take audiences for a loop. But his gamble pays off, because following Rita (Mónica Villa), a religious woman living in a remote town in Argentina, on her quest to assert her faith is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. She believes that a miracle involving a missing holy statue has manifested through her, and if that’s not the case, she is going to make sure that’s what other ladies at her church think. Her patient husband Norberto (Horacio Marassi) doesn’t fully understand her desire for beatification but goes lovingly along. A talking lamppost, a demon who rides a motorbike, a terrible Facebook profile photo, and the inherently human eagerness to know what people will say about us after we are gone coalesce in this hyper-original and cleverly executed look at earthly love and divine fate. A former Catholic missionary turned filmmaker, Gómez Bustillo ventures to answer a few existential questions: Do dogs go to heaven? Is going to heaven or hell closer to choosing a vacation package with fixed terms and conditions than a cosmic epiphany?
Disappear Completely
Sensationalist newspapers in Mexico still feature ghastly photos on the cover of their print editions alongside reprehensibly comedic headlines. But who secures those morbid snapshots of mangled bodies for them? Santiago (Harold Torres) is one such unscrupulous photographer making a living by sneaking or paying his way into crime scenes or the sites of deadly accidents and clicking his camera at the deceased. He approaches the distasteful work with the craftsmanship of someone with aspirations to exhibit his prints in a gallery. Over the course of one week, this moody new addition to the recent string of fantastic Mexican horror movies released in the last few years (think Huesera) sees Santiago experience inexplicable health issues, namely losing his five senses one by one. Perhaps someone or something isn’t happy with his lack of professional ethics or might benefit from concealing what his lens has captured. In a shrewd move, director Luis Javier Henaine plays with the form to bring the spectator as close as possible to Santiago’s deteriorating sensorial ordeal. When his hearing starts to go, the sound becomes muffled, and when his eyesight is on the line, what we see goes blurry.
Egoist
Same-sex marriage is still not legal in Japan. That’s a reality that’s present in the mind of gay men like Kôsuke (Ryohei Suzuki), a thirtysomething fashion magazine editor, who suffered bullying growing up. Now using his career and sense of style as armor, Kôsuke has a close group of friends but no partner. That sort of changes when he hires Ryûta (Hio Miyazawa), a personal trainer in his early twenties, on a friend’s recommendation. A torrid age-gap romance develops quickly between them; however, the dynamic isn’t clear-cut, even if it’s obvious that Kôsuke can bestow plenty of gifts on his new lover. Made believable by the two stars, whose roles are firmly grounded in a shared naivete about the limits of their passion, the relationship can’t escape its glaring fissures. Less financially stable, Ryûta still lives with his supportive mother, a figure who at least temporarily fills a void for Kôsuke, who already lost his. The sweet highs are high, while the lows are earth-shaking. And it’s thanks to how the tale (adapted from Makoto Takayama’s novel) veers into its unexpected resolution that we can forgive some of its more sentimental impulses.
Housekeeping For Beginners
Prolific queer North Macedonian auteur Goran Stolevski has released three features in three years, all of them touching on aspects of the complex relationship he has both with his homeland and with Australia, the country he migrated to as an adolescent. His latest takes him to modern-day Skopje, where Dita (Anamaria Marinca)—a world-weary lesbian whose household has become a chaotic safe haven for people whose sexual identities don’t fit the norm of the conservative country—struggles to connect with Vanesa (Mia Mustafi), the teenage daughter of her late partner. The rest of the residents, including her cynical gay friend Toni (Vladimir Tintor) and his charming young lover Ali (Samson Selim), rally around them so that Vanessa and her younger sister can stay permanently with Dita. There’s a lived-in, fiery quality to the performances that’s matched by the kinetic quality of the filmmaking. These people love each other passionately, but their disagreements are just as volcanic. As he examines the complication of chosen families and the value of community, Stolevski also engages with the ongoing discrimination against Romani people that remains prevalent across the Balkans, and which will inevitably affect Dita’s adopted kids.
In Flames
Horror laced with social commentary abounds with varying degrees of success. In this Pakistani supernatural ordeal, however, the combination is effectively employed to discuss the vulnerable position of women in traditionally patriarchal societies. To avoid judgment, Mariam (Ramesha Nawal), a medical student in Karachi whose grandfather has just passed, secretly starts dating a young fellow who’s been aggressively pursuing her. But after tragedy strikes, she becomes haunted by a malevolent presence that seems to manifest in the men around her. What makes writer-director Zarrar Kahn’s genre entry so powerfully unsettling is that Mariam’s plight, and in turn that afflicting her mother, begins in the physical world through unpleasant interactions with the opposite sex, then morphs into a curse in the spiritual realm. It’s as if the men sought to exert control over women even after death. The suffocating feeling that plagues the heroine and makes it difficult for her to breathe isn’t a side effect of a recent occurrence, but rather represents the weight of intergenerational trauma as a result of normalized gender-based violence and restrictions.
Inshallah A Boy
When everyone expected her to accept the transgressions against her without protest, Nawal (Mouna Hawa), a Jordanian widow, decided to fight back with all her might, not solely with the intent of defeating those who’ve wronged her, but to show her young daughter that she has a voice even if her environment tries to convince her that she doesn’t. In the aftermath of her husband’s sudden death, Nawal learns that her brother-in-law intends to collect the inheritance, which in this case is the apartment where she lives. “This is how things work,” they tell her. Since the couple didn’t have a son, Nawal legally doesn’t have much of a say, and stands to lose even custody of her daughter. In a system designed to serve men’s interests, the number of obstacles in her path seem insurmountable. The impact of this scorching social realist piece hinges on Hawa’s devastating and ferocious portrayal of a mother facing terrible odds, and still refusing to surrender her dignity. It’s a shocking reminder of the precarious status under the law that women have in some parts of the world.
Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell
Cinema as a means to grapple with whether a higher power exist or not has often yielded fascinating results. Such is the case of this three-hour, transcendent Vietnamese revelation, which rewards those who patiently commit to its long uninterrupted takes. These are incredible moviemaking feats due to the technical challenges they entail, with series of engrossing dialogues on the perils and blessings of faith. Making his feature debut, writer-director Phạm Thiên Ân display an astounding artistic maturity in summoning a tranquil melancholy while tackling robust theological inquiries. We first meet Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ), a young Catholic man whose conviction is on shaky ground, talking to two of his friends about their existential preoccupations in the bustling streets of Saigon. Forced to travel to a rural region after his sister-in-law dies, Thiện crosses path with an array of people whose perspectives enrich his own. During the film’s most formidable shot, the camera follows behind Thiện as he journeys down a dirt road to visit the home of an elderly man still dealing with traumatic memories of war. At first glance the seemingly humble shot doesn’t call much attention to itself, but on closer inspection it’s easy to admit there’s something miraculous about how it came together so seamlessly.
The Invisible Fight
Have you ever seen an orthodox monk do kung fu? That’s the selling point of this action-comedy from Estonia. One of the year’s most unexpected premises, the core of this outrageously kooky take on the martial arts film is partially based on the true story of a Soviet soldier who survive an attack at the Chinese border. The man responsible is Rainer Sarnet, who previously directed the astonishing dark folk tale November, about possessed inanimate objects and ghosts in the forest. His latest goes back to the 1970s when the restrictive U.S.S.R. still stood, and introduces us to Rafael (Ursel Tilk) a long-haired, girl-chasing troublemaker who enters a monastery to become devoted man of God with the ability to throw some punches and kicks and an affinity for black metal. The tone of its absurd comedy is broad, even vulgar at times, but its sincerity as it merges genres with an admirable abandon is intensely disarming. It’s the kind of movie that begs to be discovered late at night when in need of a juvenile laugh and some cartoonish thrills.
Omen
The Belgium-based, Congo-born multi-hyphenate Baloji explores the serrated edges of identity and belief in this bewitching and visually astounding debut, by way of a triptych that unfolds in Kinshasa. One storyline focuses on Koffi (Marc Zinga), a man who returns to his place of birth with his white Belgian wife after nearly two decades only to discover that his family still believes he was marked by the devil at birth. Then there’s pink-clad Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), the teenage leader of a gang who lost his sister but doesn’t have a body to bury. His memories of her are presented as a macabre fairytale. Lastly, Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), Koffi’s stone-faced mother, unwilling to reconsider her stance about her “jinxed” son. Ostracized because of these ingrained superstitions, Koffi tries to navigate towards healing, but what Baloji makes clear is that the otherworldly is not merely allegorical here, but taken as fact. A bona fide visionary who also designed the eye-popping costumes and composed the eerie score, Baloji materializes unshakable compositions, often drenched in saturated color, that feel dreamed into existence more than produced for a movie.
Picture Of Ghosts
For his evocative, cinephile-targeting documentary, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho rummaged through his memories of the apartment where he grew up (and where he later shot several of his projects), as well as the imposing movie palaces that once existed in his hometown of Recife. The bulk of the footage featured was filmed back in the 1990s when Mendonça Filho, then a student, realized some of these houses of cinematic worship wouldn’t be around forever; even back then some of them were on their last legs. Eventually the majority of these spaces were repurposed as evangelical churches, except for the São Luiz, which still operating today. Inextricable from each other, all of these factors formed his identity as an artist, but rather than coming across as navel-gazing reminiscence, the director’s voiceover interrogates his own nostalgia for these foundational places, for the people who ran them (like devoted projectionist Mr. Alexandre), for the movies he watched there, and for the audiences that shared those moments with him. Through what his camera captured, then and now, these specters become immortal even if they no longer inhabit our physical world. Isn’t cinema, after all, a preservationist artform?
A Prince
The most shocking instance of full-frontal male nudity in any movie this year comes near the tail end of this elegantly curious gay fable. Told almost entirely through narration, with the characters uttering few words on screen, the loose story chronicles the sexual escapades of Pierre-Joseph (first played by Antoine Pirotte and later by the film’s director, Pierre Creton), an adrift and gerontophilic young man with a troubling home life who finds refuge in learning horticulture from two older men (both of whom become his sexual partners). While there are few explicit images, the intricacies of the protagonist’s desires are delivered through voiceover subtext: A shot of several men having a meal together in a cabin is layered with the knowledge that some of the guests have had casual encounters with one another. Enigmatic and bizarrely erotic, the drama, set in Normandy, contrasts Pierre-Joseph’s still-blossoming young skin with his lovers’ more fragile, seasoned bodies. Their shared fascination with vegetation speaks, it seems, to the unstoppable will of nature, where everything that’s born must eventually return to the earth in death. Pierre-Joseph’s presence replenishes their dwindling vitality, at least until he becomes withered like them.
The Settlers
The bodies of murdered Indigenous people pile up across a misty Tierra del Fuego landscape in one of the most brutal sequences of this masterfully conceived historical Western, displaying the horrors of post-colonial Chile. Under the orders of a ruthless landowner, three men—British lieutenant Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American cowboy Bill (Benjamin Westfall), and mixed-raced Chilean laborer Segundo (Camilo Arancibia)—embark on a mission to eradicate the Indigenous population of the area and seize their territory with the excuse of pushing the young South American country into the age of modernity and progress. But while the white men feel little remorse about their atrocities, Segundo hesitates when ordered to kill, and later finds support in an Indigenous woman taken hostage. It’s his plight as someone caught in the crossfire of racism and violence that forces the viewer to question the concept of a unified nation built on a blood-soaked foundation. Given the ambition of its scope, the exquisite ruggedness of its imagery, and the piercing approach to its difficult subject matter, one can’t help but be stunned that this is the feature debut by writer-director Felipe Gálvez Haberle.
Slow
Asexual sign language interpreter Dovydas (Kestutis Cicenas) meets cotemporary dancer Elena (Greta Grineviciute) when the latter needs his help to communicate with a group of deaf students. Swept up in a swoon-worthy effervescence, they dive into a committed relationship where lust is not part of the equation, despite Dovydas’ efforts to enjoy sexual activity. That both of their professions require them to express themselves through physicality conveys a piercing irony since their bond is one of the soul, not the flesh. The airy luminosity of their interactions hinges on the palpable sincerity in performances. Cicenas’ playfulness as Dovydas is endearing, but never infantilizing. There are instances where the correlation between sexual conquest and manliness makes him profoundly insecure. If he doesn’t have sex with his partner, is he less of a man? And if the answer is no, can Elena stay with him if she feels loved but not desired? Grineviciute’s vigor as she dances to release the conflicting sentiments that burden her character mesmerizes. Much of the credit goes to Lithuanian writer-director Marija Kavtaradze, who guides them into singular intimacy. Nothing extraordinary happens, and yet its truthful, unassuming tenderness makes it the most romantic movie released in the U.S. this year.
Songs Of Earth
Executive produced by Wim Wenders and Liv Ullmann, this breathtaking Norwegian doc offers a contemplative look at nature through the eyes of director Margreth Olin’s 84-year-old father, who knows the mountains and the lake of the Oldedalen valley like few others. With endearing adoration and sorrow at the knowledge that he won’t be here forever, Olin intercuts the ridges in the landscapes with the elderly man’s skin, both marked by the passage of time. As we contemplate the postcard-ready vistas—with water so impossibly turquoise it takes one a second to realize the shot is not an illustration inside a fantasy book—he speaks of the many generations in their family who’ve called these marvelous area home. The sounds of the water flowing or crashing against the rock formations create the music, while Olin’s parents provide the lyrics from folk songs that have long endured. In observing how her dad lived a life fully in synch with his untainted surroundings, Olin ponders our inevitable impermanence and finds comfort in the fact that our role as a collective is of minuscule importance to the universe, but of infinite significance to those who love us.
Sweet Dreams
Set in the 1900 Indonesia, then still under colonial rule and known as the Dutch East Indies, Sweet Dreams’ piercing indictment on the gruesome legacy of European invasion observes an ensemble of characters each with their distinct interest for the ill-obtained assets of a late Dutch sugar plantation owner. Siti (Hayati Azis), an Indonesian housekeeper who had a child with the deceased colonizer, is the priviest to the all comings and goings at the home. Her mixed-race kid, Karel (Rio Kaj Den Haas), is the thematic key here. Raised to feel superior to the Indonesian workers that keep the operation running, Karel identifies with the Dutch, even if his mother is a servant to the invaders. For him, his tropical playground and his privileged position within it is all he’s ever known. The seed of racism will bloom inside him. When his older half-brother Cornelis (Florian Myjer) travels from the Netherlands with his pregnant wife to reclaim the property, the conflict over the dwindling wealth intensifies. Sharply written to not absolve any of those involved from their respective sins, the drama (with tinges of morbid comedy) immerses us in the turbulent past of a part of the globe we have not often seen portrayed on screen.
Terrestrial Verses
Imagine having to answer questions about a religious text during a job interview or getting your car impounded over what you were wearing while driving. These are the subjects of two of the vignettes in this unmissable and rage-inducing collection of situations about bureaucracy in Iran and how the country’s theocratic system infiltrates every aspect of people’s lives, from artistic creation to what you name your child. Each segment exists as one static shot with the camera pointing at the citizen seeking employment or a government service. The person holding the power is never seen, only their accusatory or predatory voice is heard. The absurdity inherent to these interaction highlights the vulnerability of the average person in the face of an outrageously punitive system, which also allows those in charge to be malicious in the name of doing what’s right. A female student stands accused of hanging out with a young man by the school’s principal. But the teenager knows that the adult berating her also has secrets that Iranian society would judge her harshly on. Therein thrives a vicious cycle of policing and being policed under the hypocritical banner of religious righteousness.