“Bird talk” is the language used by those excluded from the aggressive, raucous majority: the history teacher tormented by his students, a recently-fired language teacher, a leprous composer, a woman who cleans the house of a banker, a deformed florist and a student fascinated by the cinema. – MUBI
Director: Xawery Żuławski
Cast: Sebastian Fabijański, Eryk Kulm, Andrzej Chyra, Jaśmina Polak
Country: Poland
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 2 hours, 18 minutes
Platform: MUBI (Not currently available)
Sentaro runs a small bakery that serves dorayaki pastries filled with sweet red bean paste (“an”). When an old lady, Tokue, offers to help in the kitchen he reluctantly accepts. She will soon prove to have magic in her hands… – Telescope Film
Director: Naomi Kawase
Cast: Kirin Kiki, Masatoshi Nagase, Kyara Uchida, Miki Mizuno
Country: Japan, France, Germany
Distributor: Kino Lorber
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hour, 53 minutes
Platform: Hoopla
Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. – The Criterion Channel
Director: Barbara Loden
Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins
Country: United States
Distributor: Janus Films
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hour, 44 minutes
Platform: The Criterion Channel
Special Programming: Classic Cinema
A passionate holiday romance leads to an obsessive relationship when an Australian photojournalist wakes one morning in a Berlin apartment and is unable to leave. – Telescope Film
Director: Cate Shortland
Cast: Teresa Palmer, Max Riemelt, Matthias Habich, Emma Bading
Country: Australia
Distributor: Lionsgate Home Entertainment
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour, 56 minutes
Platform: Netflix
Special Programming: Midnight Movies
1945, Leningrad. World War II has devastated the city, demolishing its buildings and leaving its citizens in tatters, physically and mentally. Two young women, Iya and Masha, search for meaning and hope in the struggle to rebuild their lives amongst the ruins. – MUBI
Director: Kantemir Balagov
Cast: Viktoriya Miroshnichenko, Vasilisa Perelygina, Konstantin Balakirev, Kseniya Kutepova
Country: Russia
Distributor: Kino Lorber
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 2 hours, 14 minutes
Platform: MUBI
Special Events: Filmmaker Conversations
Sabine attaches a hair weave and gets to work. Her hands move quickly and precisely, as she tightly braids the hair in front of the sign in her salon promising African, European, and American-style coiffure. Sabine is a larger than-life personality crammed into a tiny, glassed-in shop in the largely immigrant Brussels district of Matonge. Here, she and her employees fit extensions and glue on lashes while watching soaps, dishing romantic advice, sharing rumors about government programs to legalize migrants, and talking about people back home in West Africa. – OVID
Director: Rosine Mftego Mbakam
Cast: Rosine Mbakam
Country: Belgium
Distributor: Icarus Films
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hour, 10 minutes
Platform: OVID
Special Programming: Documentary Cinema
Special Events: Filmmaker Retrospectives
Rosine Mbakam left Cameroon at 27 to live in Belgium. Seven years later—having studied film and married a European—she returns to make what she calls a journey into darkness—to the village of her birth, and later to the capital city of Yaoundé, where her mother now lives most of the year. – OVID
Director: Rosine Mftego Mbakam
Cast: Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam, Tchana Cecile
Country: Belgium, Cameroon
Distributor: Icarus Films
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hour, 16 minutes
Platform: OVID
Special Programming: Documentary Cinema
Special Events: Filmmaker Retrospectives
In a patriarchal society, an ordinary Georgian family lives with three generations under one roof. All are shocked when 52-year-old Manana decides to move out from her parents’ home. Without her family and her husband, Manana embarks on a kind of journey that she has never experienced before: a journey on her own. – Telescope Film
Director: Nana Ekvtimishvili , Simon Groß
Cast: Ia Shugliashvili, Merab Ninidze, Berta Khapava, Tsisia Qumsashvili
Country: Georgia, Germany, France
Distributor: Netflix
Rating: TV-14
Runtime: 1 hour, 59 minutes
Platform: Netflix
On their way home from Afghanistan, a band of French soldiers stop in Cyprus for decompression: three days at a sun-splashed resort, where they will undergo intense psychological debriefing. There, amidst the crystal-blue waters and hordes of vacationing tourists, Marine (Soko) and Aurore (Ariane Labed) – two of only three women in their male-dominated unit – confront rage, trauma, and army sexism as they struggle to readjust to “normal” life. – OVID
Director: Delphine Coulin
Cast: Soko, Ariane Labed, Ginger Romàn, Karim Leklou
Country: France, Greece
Distributor: First Run Features
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hour, 42 minutes
Platform: OVID
Adapted from a novel by Arnošt Lustig, Diamonds of the Night closely tracks two boys who escape from a concentration-camp transport and flee into the surrounding woods, hostile terrain where the brute realities of survival coexist with dreams, memories, and fragments of visual poetry. – The Criterion Channel
Director: Jan Němec
Cast: Ladislav Janský, Antonín Kumbera
Country: Czechoslovakia
Distributor: Janus Films
Rating: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hour, 8 minutes
Platform: The Criterion Channel
Special Programming: Classic Cinema
