Foreign

Wracked by guilt after covering up a murder, Mona tries to make amends by taking in the deceased’s southern Sudanese widow Julia, and her son Daniel, into her home. Julia’s and Mona’s lives are starkly different. Julia leads a precarious existence with an otherwise happy son and husband, while Mona is childless with a controlling spouse, albeit enjoying relative luxury. As unrest breaks out, heightened racial prejudices shatter Julia’s life. She comes to be hired as Mona’s domestic worker, but even as their relationship deepens into that of confidantes, hidden guilt and secret dreams threaten to surface and unravel. Set in Khartoum during the years prior to South Sudan’s independence and beautifully shot with a soft warmth and authenticity, Goodbye Julia deftly weaves the personal into complex sociopolitical contexts, delivering a thoughtful drama at once tender and tense.

Penélope Cruz stars as Clara, a Spanish woman who has relocated to Rome in the early 1970s to raise a family with Felice (Vincenzo Amato), her emotionally distant and frequently absent husband. From their new apartment, Clara sees a city in transition: the remnants of an old society washed away by the tastes of an emerging middle class. Even though the paint is fresh, and the appliances are new, the crushing expectations around family, desire, and gener remain as traditional as ever. Clara’s three children are likewise poised at a precipice, on the verge of adolescence and its myriad complications. Her eldest child, Adri (arresting newcomer Luana Giuliani), years for another life – an outsized, vibrantly-relized vision of a world where he simply gets to live as the boy he knows himself to be. Without an accepted vocabulary for talking about gender, Adri simply tells adults that he’s an alien from another galaxy.

A dark comedic drama about Ella, a 34 years old theater dresser and mistress, who experiences the sudden death of her lover. She attends his Shivah (a jewish mourning ritual) while keeping her identity under wraps and dives into a world once forbidden to her. Through intimate encounters with his brother, parents, and, most especially, his wife, she examines her place in his life and eventually demands her legitimate right to mourn.

When dedicated high school teacher Rachel (Virginie Efira) falls in love with Ali (Roschdy Zem), it’s not long before she also falls for his daughter Leila. The lustful giddiness of Rachel and Ali’s late-night rendezvous evolves into the familiar warmth of family picnics and after-school pickups. Although she feels like a mother, Rachel is not allowed to forget that Lelia is another woman’s daughter. She begins to long for a cild of her own, but as a forty-something woman, she is abundantly aware that she has limited time to begin a family. Rachel must decide whether to embrace the inherent entaglements of her current situation, including co-parenting with Ali’s ex-wife Alice (chiara Mastroianni), or strike out again on her own. Other People’s Chilrden becomes a soulful, sexy, and resolutely grown-up story of the elusive quest for agency and belonging.

War tragically pushed Asmaa out of her home country, Syria, where her destiny had been written as a wife and mother with only 16 years of age. Asmaa rebuilt her adult identity as the neighborhood storyteller and began using reading aloud to children for fun as a bridge to tackle critical issues in her new community at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan.

In 1984, Shoko Asahara started a seemingly innocuous yoga school based in Tokyo. By 1995, the group had evolved into a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo, meaning “Supreme Truth,” whose weapon of choice was sarin, an extraordinarily toxic nerve gas first invented by the Nazis during World War II. An unrelenting, in-depth look at the group, AUM: The Cult at the End of the World weaves a chilling narrative from Asahara’s claims of being a reincarnation of Buddha to the 1995 attack on the Tokyo subway system that left 14 dead and injured an estimated 6,000 additional civilians.

Amidst a catastrophic plastic waste crisis in her hometown of Nairobi, Nzambi Matee risks everything to pioneer revolutionary technology that transforms plastic waste into sustainable paving bricks.