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List: 2025 Movie Bingo: Set Outside of the U.S.
Aftersun
At a fading vacation resort, eleven-year-old Sophie treasures rare times with her loving and idealistic father, Calum. As the world of adolescence creeps into view, beyond her eye Calum struggles under the weight of life outside of fatherhood. Twenty years later, Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship. She tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't, in Charlotte Wells' superb and searingly emotional debut film.
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Tótem
In a bustling Mexican household, seven-year-old Sol is swept up in the whirlwind of preparations for her terminally ill father's birthday party, led by her mother, aunts, and other relatives. As the day builds to an event both anticipated and dreaded, Sol and her family begin to understand the gravity of this year's celebration. Lila Avilés directs a dynamic ensemble cast in this stunning sophomore effort-a warmly observed, poignantly funny, and emotionally expansive study of the ways we cope with grief.
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Jodái-e Náder az Simin = A Separation
A married couple are faced with a difficult decision - to improve the life of their child by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer's disease.
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A Coffee in Berlin
A love letter to Berlin and the Gen Y experience, this slacker dramedy paints a day in the life of Niko, a 20-something college dropout going nowhere fast. Niko lives an aimless life, oblivious to his growing status as an outsider, until one fateful day when he finally has to engage with life.
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Portrait de la jeune fille en feu = Portrait of a Lady on Fire
France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow.
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Four Daughters
The riveting exploration of rebellion, memory, and sisterhood reconstructs the story of Olfa Hamrouni and her four daughters, unpacking a complex family history through intimate interviews and artful reenactments to examine how the Tunisian woman's two eldest were radicalized by Islamic extremists. Casting professional actresses as the missing daughters, along with acclaimed Egyptian-Tunisian actress Hend Sabri as Olfa, award-winning director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) restages pivotal moments in the family's life. These scenes are interwoven with confessions and reflections from Olfa and her younger daughters, offering the women agency to tell their own stories and capturing moments of joy, loss, violence, and heartache. Winner of four prizes including L'Oeil d'Or (Best Documentary) when it screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Four Daughters is a compelling portrait of five women and a unique and ambitious work of nonfiction cinema that explores the nature of memory, the weight of inherited trauma, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.
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La Dolce Vita
A journalist ventures into the decadent society of modern Rome and finds that his values are being destroyed, leaving him totally disillusioned.
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Rescue Dawn
Based on the true story of U.S. fighter pilot Dieter Dengler, shot down on a top-secret bombing mission over Laos. Taken captive by the Vietnamese Army and is forced to endure a harrowing stint in a hellish Vietnamese prison camp, Dengler and a small band of his fellow captives stage a death-defying escape.
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Corsage
Faced with a future of strict ceremony and royal duties, Empress Elisabeth of Austria rebels against her public image and comes up with a plan to protect her legacy.
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A Dry White Season
White schoolteacher Ben Du Toit lives in Johannesburg and remains blissfully incurious about the lives of his black countrymen until a wave of brutal repression comes crashing down on his gardener, bringing Du Toit face-to-face with harsh political realities.
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The Banshees of Inisherin
Two lifelong friends find themselves at an impasse when one abruptly ends their relationship, with alarming consequences for both of them.
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Green Zone
During the U.S.-led occupation of Baghdad in 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller and his team of Army inspectors were dispatched to find weapons of mass destruction believed to be stockpiled in the Iraqi desert. Rocketing from one booby-trapped and treacherous site to the next, the men search for deadly chemical agents but stumble instead upon an elaborate cover-up that inverts the purpose of their mission.
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In Bruges
Two hit men, ordered by their ruthless crime boss to hideout in the fairytale city of Bruges, soon find themselves in a life and death struggle of comic proportions.
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Blind Chance
A compelling drama about the difficulty of reconciling political ideals with personal happiness. This unforgettable film follows Witek, a medical student with an uncertain future in Communist Poland; the movie dramatizes Witek's journey as a series of different possibilities, suggesting that chance rules our lives as much as choice. First suppressed and then censored by the Polish government.
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Mon crime = The Crime is Mine
After a struggling actress stands trial for the murder of a lascivious producer in 1930s Paris, she ascends to scandalous stardom with her lawyer roommate. A new life of fame, wealth, and tabloid celebrity awaits, until the truth comes out.
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Jarhead
Follows "Swoff, " a third-generation Marine enlistee, from a sobering stint in boot camp to active duty, sporting a sniper's rifle and a hundred-pound ruck on his back through the Middle East deserts. There is no cover from intolerable heat or from the Iraqi soldiers, who are always potentially just over the next horizon. Swoff and his fellow Marines sustain themselves with sardonic humanity and wicked comedy on blazing desert fields in a country they don't understand, against an enemy they can't see, for a cause they don't fully understand. Sergeant Sykes, a Marine lifer, heads up the scout/sniper platoon, while Troy, Swoff's friend and mentor, is a die-hard member of STA - the elite Marine Unit.
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Perfect Days
Koji Yakusho plays a public-toilet cleaner in Tokyo whose rich inner world is gradually revealed through his small exchanges with those around him and with the city itself.
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Kisaengch'ung = Parasite
Kim Ki-taek's family are all unemployed and living in a squalid basement. When his son gets a tutoring job at the lavish home of the Park family, the Kim family's luck changes. One by one they gradually infiltrate the wealthy Park's home, attempting to take over their affluent lifestyle.
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Pawn Sacrifice
In a gripping true story set during the height of the Cold War, American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer finds himself caught between two superpowers when he challenges the Soviet Empire. It chronicles Fischer's terrifying struggles with genius and madness, and the rise and fall of a kid from Brooklyn who captured the imagination of the world.
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Persona
A famous actress is stricken with psychosomatic dumbness and is placed under a nurse's care in an isolated house, where the two gradually assume each other's personalities.
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Red Army
An inspiring true story about the Cold War played out on the ice rink, and a man who stood up to a powerful system, paving the way for generations of Russians. Red Army examines the most successful dynasty in sports history: the Red Army hockey team. Told from the perspective of its captain, Slava Fetisov, the story portrays his transformation from national hero to political enemy. With the demise of Communism came the end of the Cold War, as Soviet players began joining the National Hockey League. The film explores how sport mirrors social and cultural movements in Cold War Russia.
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La Regle du Jeu
Cloaked in a comedy of manners, this scathing critique of corrupt French society is about a weekend hunting party at which amorous escapades abound among the aristocratic guests, which are also mirrored by the activities of the servants downstairs.
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Roman Holiday
A princess bored with her official visit to Rome slips away and plays at being an 'average Jane'. A reporter discovers her little charade and decides to cash in with an exclusive story. Before they know it, love calls.
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Saul Fia = Son of Saul
October 1944, Auschwitz-Birkenau. Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child's body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner's Kaddish.
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Shichinin no samurai : Seven Samurai
This epic masterpiece is about a group of 16th century samurai who are hired to defend a small Japanese village that finds itself annually raided by an army of bandits who steal the meager crops harvested by the peasants. Tired of relinquishing their food supply but woefully inept in combat skills, the villagers decide to hire a band of samurai to protect them. In addition to the primary conflict between the villagers and the bandits, much of the tale revolves around young Katsushiro's coming-of-age, both sexually and emotionally. Kikuchiyo's search for acceptance forms the other major storyline. Indeed, everyone in Seven Samurai is searching: for adventure, for experience, for freedom from their oppressors.
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Zwartboek : Black Book
Rachel, a young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis during World War II in The Netherlands, sees her hiding place blown up. She escapes with her rescuer, a young sailor, but the boat sails into a trap set by the Germans. She escapes and joins the resistance, and under the false name Ellis de Vries she meets SS-Hauptsturmführer Ludwig Muentze on a train smuggling weapons. She goes to his headquarters to meet him again and gain his trust, and soon they fall in love.She joins his office as a spy, but when someone within the resistance betrays her, she is now seen as an enemy betraying both sides. All that's left to do is run with the man she learned to love and find a way to prove her innocence by finding the real betrayer.
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Pather Panchali = Song of the Little Road
Impoverished priest Harihar Ray (Kanu Banerjee), dreaming of a better life for himself and his family, leaves his rural Bengal village in search of work. Alone, his wife, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), looks after her rebellious daughter, Durga (Uma Das Gupta), and her young son, Apu (Subir Banerjee), as well as Harihar's elderly aunt Indir (Chunibala Devi). The children enjoy the small pleasures of their difficult life, while their parents suffer the daily indignities heaped upon them.
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The Mirror
Tarkovsky's looking glass is not merely cracked but shattered and we see the jagged, jumbled reflections of its shards, images of Tarkovsky's childhood mixed with fragments of his adult life--a child's wartime exile, a mother's experience with political terror, the breakup of a marriage, life in a country home--all intermingled with slow-motion dream sequences and poetic chunks of stark newsreels.
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Neruda
An inspector hunts down Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who becomes a fugitive in his home country in the late 1940s for joining the Communist Party.
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A Chiara
"Follows the story of 15-year-old Chiara whose close-knit family falls apart after her father abandons them in Calabria."--IMDb.
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The Taste of Things
Cook Eugenie and her boss Dodin have grown fond of one another for over 20 years, and their romance gives rise to dishes that impress even the world's most illustrious chefs. When Dodin is faced with Eugenie's reluctance to commit, he begins to cook for her.
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Green Border
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, Green Border immediately drew controversy from the Polish government for its depiction of the European migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border. Shot in stark black-and-white, this riveting thriller explores the intractable conflict from multiple perspectives: a Syrian family fleeing ISIS caught between cruel border guards in both countries; young guards instructed to brutally reject the migrants; and activists who, at great risk, aid the refugees.
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