Browse Movies : NR : Adaptation : P

Occupied France, 1942. Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is arrested by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany. En route to the camp, he narrowly avoids sudden execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, as one of the soldiers’ superior officers is “looking for a Persian,” and has promised additional rations to the soldier who delivers. Gilles is then assigned a literal life-or-death mission: to teach Farsi to Head of Camp Koch (Lars Eidinger), who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. Through an ingenious trick, Gilles manages to survive by inventing words of “Farsi” every day and teaching them to Koch. The unusual relationship between the two men sparks jealousy in other prisoners and particularly the SS guards towards Gilles. Meanwhile Koch’s suspicions grow every day, and Gilles struggles with the unfairness of his privileges compared to his fellow prisoners, while fighting to maintain his secret and survive.

Follows 15 year-old Nicola (newcomer Francesco Di Napoli) who lives with his mother and younger brother in the Sanità neighborhood of Naples, a place that has been controlled by the Camorra mafia for centuries. Dreaming of a life lush with designer clothing and elite nightclub bottle service, Nicola and his group of friends begin selling drugs, an entryway into the violent, power-hungry world of crime that begins to threaten their innocence, relationships, and safety of their families.

In 2013, Samantha Bloom (two-time Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts), her husband Cameron (The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln) and their three sons left their home in Australia for a holiday in Thailand. While enjoying a view, Sam fell off of a rooftop due to what was later determined to be a rotted railing...breaking her vertebrae in two places. Paralyzed from the chest down, Sam — a lifelong outdoorswoman, surfer, and traveler —was unrecognizable to herself, and spent long months in a depression that made her question who she could be in the world and in her own family.

A year later, her children brought home a wounded baby magpie they found. Warily eyeing the black-and-white bird the kids affectionately named “Penguin,” Sam bonded with the household’s new member, beginning a process of emotional healing that surprised her husband and sons, her mother (Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver), and herself. Penguin Bloom tells the amazing true story of renewal that occurred when a woman whose life seemed shattered found hope and purpose in her family’s love — and in a bird on its own journey of recovery.