Istanbul Modern Cinema brings the 'Oscar’s Foreigners' selection to film lovers

Istanbul Modern Cinema is presenting a selection prepared from the 'Best International Feature Film' category, as the 96th Academy Awards approach, through a program titled 'Oscar’s Foreigners'. The program features 10 films.

Pointing out that they have prepared a selection from films that have been screened and won awards at various film festivals around the world, Istanbul Modern Cinema Curator Müge Turan said, "The Oscar’s Foreigners program, which we are organizing for the 10th time this year, opens space for films representing different geographies and cultures from the exciting category of the Oscar race, formerly known as 'Best Foreign Language Film'.

We are enabling films that are still considered 'the other' by Hollywood, despite being Oscar nominees, to meet with the audience."

Among the standout films in the selection, which includes nominees from the “Best International Feature Film” category, are Bhutan’s first-ever Oscar nominee The Monk and the Gun, İlker Çatak’s film competing for Germany The Teachers' Lounge, France’s Oscar nominee The Taste of Things, which won him the Best Director award at Cannes this year, and Anthony Chen's Singaporean film Breaking Ice, which premiered at Cannes.

FOUR DAUGHTERS, 2023

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Cast: Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui, Nour Karoui

Known for her films Beauty and the Dogs and The Man Who Sold His Skin, the director focuses this time on the true story of a family mourning two daughters who disappeared in Tunisia in 2015. Olfa Hamrouni’s two daughters, aged 15 and 16, disappear one day, leaving her and her other two younger daughters helpless. The director uses professional actors to portray Olfa and her daughters, conveying the trauma through performance. Although Four Daughters has won documentary awards, it is a pseudo-fiction that constantly pushes us to question the reality we see on screen.

GHOSTS, 2023

Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho

Cast: Sonia Braga, Tony Curtis, Maeve Jinkings

Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, known for his fiction films such as Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, returns with a playful and joyful documentary that tells of his love for cinema and the city of Recife, where he discovered it. Ghosts uses both contemporary footage and archival material such as photographs, news reports, home recordings, and clips from the director’s own films. While freely addressing topics like architecture, urban transformation, genre cinema, or the relationship between the Nazis and film distribution in Brazil, it intertwines fiction and documentary. The director, who says "fiction films are the best documentaries," reminds us that both producing and watching cinema is a collective and magical experience.

BREAKING ICE, 2023

Director: Anthony Chen

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu, Chuxiao Qu

The film draws an impressive portrait of three young people trapped in their own existential crises, suffering from loneliness in different ways. It tells the story of a warm and unusual love triangle that develops between three friends against the beauty of winter in Yanji, a snow-covered city on China's border with North Korea. The director of the film, described as an impressive and free-spirited Gen Z drama from its cinematography to its acting, is a familiar name: Anthony Chen, the director of Ilo Ilo, which was also featured in the 2013 “Oscar’s Foreigners” program and was the first Singaporean film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival.

THE PEASANTS, 2023

Directors: DK Welchman, Hugh Welchman

Cast: Kamila Urzedowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Miroslaw Baka

The latest work from the directors of Loving Vincent, known as the world’s first feature-length oil-painted film, The Peasants is a drama set in 19th-century Poland. This cinematic feast, which tells the story of a love triangle developing around the marriage of a beautiful young girl, Jagna, to an elderly landowner, is adapted from the Nobel Prize-winning novel of the same name by Wladyslaw Reymont.

Conveying the changing seasons, farm life, and human relationships in both a natural and harsh language, the film was first shot with actors using a hand-painting technique inspired by 19th-century impressionist paintings, after which oil paintings were produced for the 79,000 frames that make up the film.

THE TASTE OF THINGS, 2023

Director: Anh Hung Tran

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Magimel, Emmanuel Salinger

The film by Vietnamese-born French director Tràn Anh Hùn, which won him the “Best Director” award at Cannes this year, is a feast for gastronomy lovers. The unusual love between the talented cook played by Juliette Binoche and the gourmet played by Benoît Magimel, reinforced by their passion for food, becomes the source of a story that also touches on class relations and gender roles. For much of the film, while we witness the process of preparing delicious dishes with all five of our senses, it proves that there is no difference between cooking for someone and loving them.

20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL, 2023

Director: Mstyslav Chernov

Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist Mstyslav Chernov shows the picture of Mariupol under siege and the courage of those trying to survive in these conditions in an impressive documentary. During the siege and attack that began in Mariupol, as bombs fall and access to electricity, food, water, and medicine is cut off, this team—the only journalists left in the city—struggles both to report on this atrocity and to transmit the footage they have captured to the world. When they are finally surrounded by Russian soldiers, they seek a way to escape by taking shelter in a hospital. Witnessing so much death, Chernov and his colleagues wonder if their reporting will make any difference.

THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE, 2023

Director: İlker Çatak

Cast: Leonie Benesch, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, Rafael Stachowiak

The film, which had its world premiere in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival, is about Carla Nowak, a dedicated teacher of Polish origin who starts her first job at a high school. When a series of thefts occur at the school, Carla decides to solve the matter herself and installs a hidden camera. With the truths that emerge, Carla finds herself trapped between parents, colleagues, and students within a rigid education system. With its dramatic intensity, relentless pace, and criticism of the racism embedded in society, it is one of the best films of 2023.

THE MONK AND THE GUN, 2023

Director: Pawo Choyning Dorji

Cast: Tandin Wangchuk, Harry Einhorn, Tandin Phubz

The film is set in Bhutan in the mid-2000s, at a time when the king decides to abdicate the throne and introduce elections for the first time in the country's history. An elderly monk is worried about the consequences of the major changes coming to his country and tells his young student to bring him two rifles by the full moon to "fix everything." The young monk is confused by his guru's request. His knowledge of guns is limited to what he has seen in James Bond, the only film playing on television. This mission brings him face-to-face with a crooked American rifle collector. Bhutan’s first-ever Oscar nominee is a sweet satire on armament and capitalism.

SHAYDA, 2023

Director: Noora Niasari

Cast: Leah Purcell, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Mojean Aria

In the debut feature film by Iranian-Australian director Noora Niasari, based on her own experiences, we watch Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who won the “Best Actress” award at Cannes, in the lead role. Shayda wants to make a new start by escaping the life she shares with her daughter Mona and her abusive husband Hossein, who is also Mona's father. Staying in a secret women's shelter, Shayda applies for legal processes to protect herself from Hossein's mistreatment, but Hossein is granted unsupervised visitation rights. As Shayda tries to live a normal life, she worries that Hossein might take Mona back to Iran. Shayda is a brave film about women that approaches its characters with compassion.

VERA, 2023

Directors: Tizza Covi, Rainer Frimmel

Cast: Vera Gemma, Daniel De Palma, Sebastian Dascalu

In the lead role of Vera, a life story that blends reality and fiction, is Vera Gemma, the daughter of the handsome Italian star Giuliano Gemma, who acted in many spaghetti western films. While this hybrid documentary follows Vera’s socialite life in Rome, we also watch her loneliness and her struggle to cope with aging. Like many other children of celebrities, we feel deep empathy for this woman who is trying to deal with the inevitable legacy of a father who left her to the mercy of a cruel world. Playing a complex and fragile version of herself, Vera Gemma delivers an unforgettable performance in front of the camera.