I Film Fest Best Foreign Films Series

[2008] 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Romania)

noreply@blogger.com (sailatt) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:00:00 +0000

The film follows the story of Otilia Mihartescu (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabriela 'Găbiţa' Dragut (Laura Vasiliu), two university friends in Bucharest, Romania. The film is set in 1987,[3] one of the last years of the Ceauşescu regime. When Găbiţa falls pregnant, the two girls arrange a meeting with Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) in a hotel, where he is to perform an illegal abortion.

Mr. Bebe discovers that Gabriela's claim that her pregnancy was in its third month is a lie; in fact, it has been four months, three weeks, and two days (hence, the title). After threatening to leave when he makes it clear that he wanted sexual favors, and not just money, in exchange for the abortion, Mr. Bebe blackmails both Otilia and Gabriela into having sex with him in exchange for the abortion.

Click Here to Watch

credit: ricochetguro@ youtube

[2008] The Kite Runner (USA)

noreply@blogger.com (sailatt) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:25:00 +0000

2008 Golden Globe Winner

The plot of the movie follows that of the novel. It tells the story of Amir, a well-to-do boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who is haunted by the guilt of betraying his childhood friend Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the Taliban regime.

Click Here to Watch

[2008] Lust, Caution - (ထိုင္၀မ္ - USA - တရုတ္) - (Taiwan, USA, China)

noreply@blogger.com (sailatt) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:20:00 +0000

2008 Golden Globe Award Winner

The film adaption and the story are loosely based on events that took place during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. The film's explicit sex scenes resulted in the film being rated NC-17 in the US. Filmmakers usually make cuts in their films to avoid the NC-17 rating, because it usually results in less widespread distribution. Indeed, Lust,Caution is the first NC-17 film to be slated for wide distribution in the United States since Showgirls (1995).

Lust, Caution (Chinese: 色，戒; pinyin: Sè, Jiè) is an espionage thriller directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee, based on the short story of the same name published in 1979 by Chinese author Eileen Chang. Lee, an Academy Award winner, won his second Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival with this film. The story is mostly set in Hong Kong in 1938 and in Shanghai in 1942, when the city was occupied by the Japanese and ruled by a puppet government of Wang Jingwei. It depicts a group of Chinese university students who plot to kill a high-ranking Chinese collaborator using an attractive young woman to lure him into a trap.

[2008] Persepolis (အီရန္-Iran)

noreply@blogger.com (sailatt) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:06:00 +0000

2008 Golden Globe Winner

Persepolis is a 2007 award-winning animated film based on Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel of the same name. The film was written and directed by Satrapi with Vincent Paronnaud. The story follows a young girl as she comes of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution, and shows how her family's hopes for change were slowly dashed as the Islamic fundamentalists took power, drastically curtailing personal liberties, forcing head coverings on women and imprisoning thousands; the story ends with Marjane as a 21-year-old expatriate. The title is a reference to the historic city of Persepolis.

[2007] The Lives of the Others (Germany)

noreply@blogger.com (sailatt) — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:34:00 +0000

2007 Best Foreign Film Award Winner

The horrifying, sometimes unintentionally funny system of observation in the former East Germany. In the early 1980s, the successful dramatist Georg Dreyman and his longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland, a popular actress, are big intellectual stars in the socialist state, although they secretly don't always think loyal to the party line. One day, the Minister of Culture becomes interested in Christa, so the secret service agent Wiesler is instructed to observe and sound out the couple, but their life fascinates him more and more... Written by fippi2000

ေထြလာ (Preview) - ဒီမွာႏွိပ္ပါ (Click Here)

ဘာသာစကား (language) - ဂ်ာမန္ (erman)

စာတမ္းထိုး (Subtitle) - အဂၤလိပ္ (English)

ရံုတင္သည့္ႏွစ္ (Date of Release) - ၂၀၀၇ (2007)

အမ်ိဳးအစား (Gerne) - သမိုင္း Drama- Historical

ရုပ္ရွင္ၾကည့္ရန္ (To Watch) - ဒီမွာႏွိပ္ပါ (Click Here)

credits: wikipedia (pic), imdb (summary), krosmo@youtube (clips)

[2007] Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico/Spain/USA)

noreply@blogger.com (sailatt) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 21:02:00 +0000

Pan's Labyrinth takes place in a dual setting: in the "real world" the story is set in Spain during the turbulent period shortly after the Spanish Civil War, and tells an allegorical story of a girl named Ofelia who is given three tasks by a mysterious faun. Meanwhile, her stepfather, the Falangist Captain Vidal, viciously hunts the Spanish Maquis, guerrillas who continued fighting the Franco regime in the region, as her pregnant mother grows ill. The alternate setting is a secret "fantasy world" that Ofelia enters through an overgrown labyrinth garden, where she meets all manner of strange and magical creatures who become central to her story. The film employs make-up, puppetry, and CGI effects to create its creatures.

Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish: El laberinto del fauno, literally The Labyrinth of the Faun) is a 2006 Academy Award-winning Spanish language fantasy film[2][3] written and directed by Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro. It was produced and distributed by the Mexican film company Esperanto Films.

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[2007] Volver - To Return (Spain)

noreply@blogger.com (sailatt) — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:44:00 +0000

The film opens in a cemetery full of women cleaning and tending to their families' gravestones. Two sisters, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and Sole (Lola Dueñas) and Raimunda's daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) are cleaning the grave of their parents who had died in a tragic fire. The events which had occurred on the night of the fire are only gradually revealed, but are central to the plot of the film.

After their Aunt Paula dies, Sole returns to the village for the funeral. Agustina (Blanca Portillo), Aunt Paula’s neighbour whose mother had disappeared without a trace three years ago, tells Sole that she has heard the aunt talking with Sole's departed mother, Irene. Agustina helps Sole, who is “terrified of the dead,” to avoid seeing the corpse at the funeral. In her aunt’s house, Sole encounters the ghost of her mother...

Clip 1

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