Int’l Critics Line: Croatia’s Oscar Submission ‘Tereza37’

Alissa Simon Film CriticWith last year’s surprise nominee “The Man Who Sold His Skin” hailing from Tunisia, Oscar handicappers should be sure to give West Asia and North Africa titles close scrutiny this time around. Among the 11 submissions are several titles likely to be highly competitive in the international feature category.

2021 Miss Universe kicked off this past December 10th. The 70th edition of the popular show will be hosted in Israel at the Universe Arena, with an audience of about 5,000 people.

The eponymous edifice of Cambodia’s International Feature Oscar entry, White Building, is barely white at all by the time we encounter it. A low-rise apartment block in Phnom Penh — the sort of teeming anthill of humanity familiar to anyone who has spent time in a South East Asian city — it is stained with tropical rain, its cement falling off in chunks, its cat’s cradles of improvised electrical wiring truly shocking, in every sense of the word. Director Kavich Neang grew up here.

Richard Kuipers Female rage is powerfully distilled and expertly distributed in “Rehana Maryam Noor,” a riveting social drama about a female doctor who demands justice in a case of sexual assault at a Dhaka medical school. The second feature by Abdullah Mohammad Saad (“Live From Dhaka”) features a superb lead performance by Azmeri Haque Badhon as the medico whose relentless determination drives her toward reckless obsession.

Flash, flicker, flash, cut to black. We’re watching grainy film of men walking in and out of the stalls in a West German public toilet, casting glances at each other, maybe a fumbling feel; a reverse angle shows us the camera behind the mirror. The men can’t see it, but some of them must surely guess it’s there and defy the odds anyway. Because without defiance, without desire, what are they? Without those things, they know they will only ever be half-alive.

There are moments in Drunken Birds, Serbian Canadian director Ivan Grbovic’s long-awaited second feature, that evoke strong sense memories of Days Of Heaven, Terrence Malick’s definitive film about the beauty and hardship of the rural laboring life. Days Of Heaven was set in 1916; Drunken Birds takes place today on a successful vegetable farm in Québec, where the workers are bussed in seasonally from Mexico.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentCAA has signed Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, the up-and-coming director of “The Gravedigger’s Wife,” Somalia’s first ever official submission for the Oscars international feature film race.“The Gravedigger’s Wife,” Ahmed’s feature debut,” world premiered at Cannes’ Critics’ Week and went on to win the Amplify Voices Award at Toronto.

Oscar Isaac had been waiting a long time to work with filmmaker Paul Schrader, and in The Card Counter, he found a much-longed-for opportunity to portray an antihero directly in the mold of the writer-director’s signature works including Taxi Driver, Light Sleeper and First Reformed.

In 1999, 240 people disappeared when Serbian forces descended on the village of Krusha e Madhe in Kosovo, shot or captured the men and burned the residents out. According to the end-titles in Blerta Basholli’s triple Sundance-award winning Hive, there are still 64 missing.

Few stock scenes in the cinema stir a surge of emotion as reliably as the sight of an underdog winning a race. There is the victor’s ribcage breaking through the ribbon at the finishing line, the runner’s exhausted smile, the arms raised in victory, the quiver rising to a swell of violins and finally, in the viewer, the lump in the throat. That was where Chariots Of Fire struck gold: it actually did eat your heart out.

The Icelandic mountains loom, the mists swirl between the peaks to where horses suddenly skitter in the snow. The only sound is stertorous breathing as the camera, clearly asserting something’s point of view, approaches the herd. Away they run.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentLegendary Croatian-born NBA player Dražen Petrović will be portrayed in Danilo Šerbedžija’s upcoming biopic film “Higher Force – The Drazen Petrovic Story” (working title).The film was penned by Ivan Turkovic Krnjak (“Lovebox”) and is being produced by Ljubo Zdjelarević and Ivor Šiber at Zagreb-based Kinoteka. The film will shoot next year in Croatia, Germany, and in the U.S.

Pregnant prisoners are the subject of 107 Mothers, Slovakia’s striking but somewhat sluggish International Feature Oscar entry directed by Peter Kerekes who co-wrote with Ivan Ostrochovský, winning Best Screenplay in the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons section earlier this year.

The Outlaws star opened up about the odd experience in a new interview with The Sun, explaining he had been working in Croatia when he got a case of food poisoning.“This ­doctor comes and he examines me and he says, ‘I’ll give you an injection to loosen your stomach muscles.

It looks like Casey Affleck has quietly split from longtime love Floriana Lima as it appears he has a new girlfriend.