Tag: movie recommendations

List of International Films I Watched This Winter Break

January 8, 2022

Some friends of mine and I watched these films over these past couple of months. They rented them from the library and all of them are really good.

  1. A Borrowed Identity: This movie takes place in the Israel-Palestine area and it’s about an Israeli-Palestinian boy who grows up during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is conflicted about his identities since there is so much tension between Israeli people and Palestinian people, and he ends up going to a school where most, if not all, of the people there are Israeli. He meets a young Israeli man who has muscular dystrophy and has to use a wheelchair, and he strikes up a friendship between him and his mom. The Israeli man at first doesn’t like him because he is Palestinian, but as the protagonist shows this young man his compassion and friendship, they develop a deeper bond, but that bond is jeopardized continuously by the ongoing war between Israelis and Palestinians. Also the guy falls in love with this girl who is Israeli, and they have to keep their relationship hidden from the public. The young man ends up adopting an Israeli identity by taking his friend’s ID and passing as Israeli.
  2. Julieta: this film is by Pedro Almodovar, a Spanish film director who has directed numerous films, such as The Skin I Live In, I’m So Excited, Volver and other films. There was recently a New York Times article about him that I still have to read, but basically the film takes place in Spain and it’s about a woman named Julieta (played by Emma Suarez) whose daughter has gone missing. She goes through a long process of grief and memory, and discovers many haunting things about her past.
  3. Young Ahmed: This film is set in Belgium, and it’s about a young man named Ahmed who practices Islam, and he takes what his imam tells him to the extreme and puts together a plan to murder his teacher.
  4. The Way Back: This film is set in South Korea, and the film was released in 2002. It’s about a little boy whose mom takes him to live with his grandmother, who is both deaf and mute. At first he rejects her kindness, but then he learns to love and appreciate her because she shows him unconditional love. It was a deeply touching film.
  5. The Keeper: This film is set in England after World War II, and it’s about a German prisoner of war who falls in love with football and an Englishwoman. It’s a true story about Bert Trautmann, who was a professional goalkeeper for Manchester’s football team. At first the woman doesn’t trust him because of all the bad things the Nazis did, but then she falls in love with him and the movie is about how he overcomes a lot of prejudice from others and wins the trust of his teammates and the fans of the football team. It was truly a deep movie.
  6. Honeyland: this is a documentary set in Macedonia, and it’s about a woman who lives with her aging mother and harvests honey for a living. She goes to the city and sells her honey to people, and is happy with her life in general. But then a family moves in next door and takes on the art of beekeeping to help their business run. At first the woman who lives with her mother is fine with it, but as the family starts to overstep their boundaries and take control of the area, tensions build between her and the family and it becomes harder for them to live harmoniously. It is a beautiful moving film that also made me appreciate bees so much more. In the film, there’s several scenes where the people eat raw honeycomb that the woman freshly pulls from under a large stone fixture in the earth, and it reminded me of these ASMR videos (autonomous sensory meridian response) where people in the videos eat raw honeycomb from the store. I actually really love the chewing noises when people eat honeycomb and find it calming, so the scenes where the people are eating raw honeycomb were pretty relaxing.
  7. True Mothers: this one was deep. When I first watched it with my mom and dad I was super tired and had very little sleep, and so I unfortunately started nodding off. But I watched it a second time, and holy smokes it blew me away. It’s about a couple named Satoko and Kiyokazu Kurihara who tries to get pregnant but end up not being able to conceive, so they contact an adoption agency called Baby Baton, where mothers who can’t raise their kids give their kids to new parents who can raise their kids. At first, the biological mother of the baby the couple adopts lets them raise her baby, but then later on, when Asato (the child’s adoptive name) is six years old his biological mother, Hikari Katakura, calls Satoko (the wife of the couple) and says to give back her child. The movie explores Hikari’s past as well as the difficulties that the mothers at Baby Baton face in giving up their children. It truly was a powerful movie, and there were a lot of intense plot twists.
  8. In Between: This movie takes place in Israel, and it’s about three independent-minded young Palestinian women who share an apartment together in Tel Aviv. In the movie, they navigate the complex social norms of womanhood that people expect of them while trying to remain true to themselves.
  9. A Tale of Love and Darkness: I watched this today (1/8/22) and it was a really deep movie. It takes place in the British Mandate of Palestine, and it’s the film adaptation of a memoir by Amos Oz, an Israeli author.