Browse Movies : Foreign (Page #5)

This is the true story of how a Japanese businessman from Los Angeles, Eishy Hayata, built an emerald mining empire in Columbia that is today one of the world's largest and most powerful, starting in the 1970s as an "esmeraldero", an emerald buyer who goes directly to rural areas where emeralds can be procured from locals at bargain prices in their rough form. Central to the film's intrigue are Columbia's more brutal realities, as guerrilla warfare and street kidnappings are quite common. To combat this, Hayata fashions himself as a sort of modern cowboy, armed and dressed to fit the bill, along with a powerful cadre of personal bodyguards.

Poppy is a teacher from north London whose life, at first glance, seems to be full of complications. It is hard to figure if she is a little crazy and irresponsible or deeply sane and sensible. Either way, everybody falls in love with her for better or for worse.

Story is set in the woods of an Appalachian-like area of Chile and follows two sisters, portrayed by Siboney Lo and Carolina Escobar, who escape from their sexually abusive father and find existence on the run just as perilous.

Teens Will and his best friend set off in search of a mysterious treasure in a race against a group of motley buccaneers, including the dastardly Black Soul Whistle and the lovely pirate princess Honky Tonk Hannah.

The story centers on family honor killings among Muslims in Britain and other European countries.

The unspoken code of the underworld: keep your mouth shut, protect your family and don't be a traitor. Dris, having spent the last four years in jail with his mouth shut, wants to get back to his quiet life with his beautiful wife. But the past is never far away, and his partner and best friend Yanis, who now runs the streets, wants nothing more than to bring Dris back into the family.

From the slums of Paris to the limelight of New York, Edith Piaf's life was a battle to sing and survive, live and love. Raised in poverty, Edith's magical voice and her passionate romances and friendships with the greatest names of the period - Yves Montand, Jean Cocteau, Charles Aznavour, Marlene Dietrich, Marcel Cerdan and others - made her a star all around the world. But in her audacious attempt to tame her tragic destiny, the Little Sparrow - her nickname - flew so high she could not fail to burn her wings.

Legendary criminal. Proud homosexual. Cabaret star. Passionate lover. Killer. Devoted father of seven adopted children. Saint or devil? Madame Satã. Born to slaves in the arid wasteland of Northern Brazil and sold by his mother at the age of 7, he pursued his freedom on the mean streets of Lapa, Rio de Janeiro. Jet-black, six feet tall, 180 pounds of proud muscle in a silk shirt and tight pants, a cutthroat razor in his back pocket. Karim Aïnouz's extraordinary portrait of the triumphs and tragedy of this explosive and paradoxical personality unfolds against the vibrant, sordid background of Lapa: thronging underworld of pimps and whores, of cut-throats, queers and artists, of dark bars and brothels thick with smoke, drenched in sweat and cheap perfume. A world run through with violence and raw desire, where desperate dreams spring from poverty and squalor.

At a deserted train station, a teacher and a gangster meet and realize that each might have been better suited to the other man's way of life. As a friendship of sorts develops between these opposite personalities, each starts to envy the other and by the week's end, everything will change for both of them.

Genya Tachibana is a director and the president of a small production company. One day, he is contacted by the famous Gin Ei studios, that ask him to direct a documentary commemorating their 70 years of existence. Genya chooses as a subject the legendary actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, a superstar actress who 30 years earlier chose to end her career and disappear from public life. Chiyoko Fujiwara is a cinematographic enigma that nobody ever seemed to shed light on. Genya is obsessed by this fallen star, wanting to unravel the truth behind her secret. Accompanied by a young cameraman, Genya finds his way to Chiyoko, who has transformed into an elderly hermit living alone in an isolated house. At their first meeting, Genya sees that Chiyoko, although touched by the hand of time, has not lost any of her charm or energy. To gain her confidence, he brings her an ancient key that holds sentimental value, that rapidly allows Chiyoko to begin recounting her memories. The interview takes course, and our 3 protagonists are plunged into the past, visiting each fragment of what has been long gone, where the past and present meld together. The actress' recollections soon metamorphosize into a great adventure where cinema confronts her history and an incredible love is unveiled, that conflicted with her rather uncommon lifestyle...

During the early 1960s, Paris was an explosion of life. As the old gave way to the new, everything was in flux and the city was filled with an energy that promised cultural shifts and social change. Against this background, in a working class neighborhood, two unlikely characters--a young Jew and an elderly Muslim--begin a friendship. When we meet Moise, also known as Momo, he is in effect an orphan even tough he lives with prostitutes who treat him with genuine affection. Momo buys his groceries at the neighborhood shop, a crowded dark space owned and run by Ibrahim, a silent exotic looking man who sees and knows more than he lets on. After Momo is abandoned by his father, Ibrahim becomes the one grownup in Momo's life. Together they begin a journey that will change their lives forever.

Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers. They have never been to school. The very existence of three of them has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves behind a little money and a note asking her 12-year-old boy to look after his younger siblings. And so begins the children's odyssey, a journey nobody knows. Despite their mother's abandonment, the four children do their best to survive in their own little world, devising and following their own set of rules. But when they have no choice but to engage with the world outside the apartment, the fragile balance that has sustained them collapses. Kore-eda incorporated documentary techniques to makes this film extraordinarily intimate and unaffected. Filmed chronologically over a year, "Nobody Knows" captures the young amateur actors growing as their characters do, highlighting the details of the children's lives, whether the nuances of a manicure, a toy piano, squeaking sandals, a cup of instant noodles, or a box of chocolates, to evoke not only the distinctive world of these particular abandoned children, but the gentleness and beauty of every childhood.

This is a sex comedy about memory loss, as office worker Graham (Eduardo Noriega) has recently suffered a complete memory loss from a martial arts-related accident, which means that every time he has sex with Irene, one of the secretaries, he forgets about it an hour later, so every time is the first time...

A love story spanning two continents, "Nowhere in Africa" is the extraordinary true tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel (Juliane Kohler) and their five-year-old daughter Regina each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country-learning the local language and customs, and finding a friend in Owuor, the farm's cook. As the war rages on the other side of the world, the trio's relationships to their strange environment become increasingly complicated as Jettel grows more self-assured and Walter more haunted by the life they left behind. As they eventually learn to cherish their life in Africa, they also endeavor to find a way back to each other.

Bruno Le Roux (Elie Belvaux) breaks out of the prison in which he's served 15 years of a life sentence for his membership in an armed wing of a left-wing revolutionary movement, the Popular Army. Bruno is determined to continue the fight against capitalist society, and to avenge his fallen comrades-in-arms. But most of his former associates are dead or behind bars, and the others are either unwilling or untrustworthy. He seeks help from former radical Jeanne (Catherine Frot), but she's now a mother and schoolteacher. Another former contact is local crime boss Jaquillat (Patrick Descamps). Years earlier, Bruno and Jaquillat had been allies in a bank robbery, but now Jaquillat's drug dealing is seriously constrained by the massive police presence as the manhunt for Bruno continues. It's in Jaquillat's interests to finish off Bruno. An alliance between Jaquillat and local cop Pascal Manise (Gilbert Melki) makes things even more dangerous for Bruno. Whatever ideals Bruno might once have had have been distorted by imprisonment and suffering. Bruno is now willing to kill for the most casual reasons -- he's turned into a psychopath with nothing to lose. However, he finds an unexpected ally in Agnes (Dominique Blanc), Manise's junkie wife. Bruno helps her when she is attacked by a street dealer, and, without really knowing who he is, she finds him a place to stay, in the chalet owned by her friend, Cecile (Ornella Muti).

A 12-year-old Afghan girl and her mother lose their jobs when the Taliban closes the hospital where they work. The Taliban have also forbidden women to leave their houses without a "legal companion." With her husband and brother dead there is no one left to support the family, and without being able to leave the house the mother is left with nowhere to turn. Feeling she has no other choice, she disguises her daughter as a boy. Now called Osama, the girl embarks on a terrifying and confusing journey as she tries to keep the Taliban from finding out her true identity. Inspired by a true story, "Osama" is the first entirely Afghan film shot since the rise and fall of the Taliban.

The film follows the structure of Dante's masterwork, beginning in Hell. In Godard's hands, hell becomes a devastating but beautifully collected montage of war images. War - be it World War II, Algeria, Vietnam, Israel or Bosnia - is a constant in his films, but never has he pieced together an assemblage of such poetic power. Purgatory finds Godard himself in Sarajevo, where he has been invited to attend a European literary conference with other artists and writers. Here we are introduced to a young French-Jewish journalist based in Israel who has come to Sarajevo to see a place "where reconciliation is possible." Paradise is the most enigmatic section of the film, where the journalist finds peace by the water on a small beach guarded by American Marines.

Itami, a young Japanese man, falls deeply in love with Cynthia, a beautiful Chinese girl. Their brief happiness ends when he is called home for his military service and they are forced to part. Three years later, Shanghai has been unofficially occupied by Japan. Cynthia - now known as Ding Hui—is working for Purple Butterfly, a resistance group planning to assassinate Yamamoto, head of the Japanese secret service. Itami is also in Shanghai, operating as a secret agent and reporting directly to Yamamoto.

In "Saraband", Marianne and Johan (the couple in "Scenes from a Marriage") meet again after thirty years without contact, when Marianne suddenly feels a need to see her exhusband again. She decides to visit Johan at his old summer house in the western province of Dalarna. And so, one beautiful autumn day, there she is, beside his reclining chair, waking him with a light kiss.

Also living at the summer house are Johan's son Henrik and Henrik's daughter Karin. Henrik is giving his daughter cello lessons and already sees her future as staked out. Relations between father and son are very strained, but both are protective of Karin. They are all still mourning Anna, Henrik's much-loved wife, who died two years ago, yet who, in many ways, remains present among them. Marianne soon realizes that things are not all as they should be, and she finds