Almost 40% of our soon to be released list of Top 50 best films of 2014 comes from a non English speaking country, a symptom perhaps of the healthy moment and creative wealth filmmaking all over the world is enjoying.
Always a heavily competitive category, among those films that were left at the gate of our 7 nominee selection were Korean Bong Joon-Ho’s post-apocalyptic political sci-fi ‘Snopiercer’; Mexicans Diego Quemada-Díez and his moving ‘The Golden Cage’ and Amat Escalante’s violent corruption denounce ‘Heli’; the latest from such acclaimed directors as Iranian Asghar Farhadi, ‘The Past’ or Chinese Jia Zhangke, “A Touch Of Sin”, the Palestinian drama ‘Omar’ or the charming Swedish teen girls punk rebellion of ‘We Are The Best’.
The ones that did make it to our nominations shortlist are Pawel Pawlikowski’s exquisitely shot ‘Ida’, the story of a young novice given time off to find out the fate of her relatives, also a powerful reflection on Poland’s historical wounds; The impossible fight of an honest man versus a corrupt society in ‘Leviathan’, brilliantly witten by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev; Canadian wunderkid Xavier Dolan’s best film to date, the exhilarating melodrama of single mother struggling to live with his personality disorder suffering son, ‘Mommy’; Philippine’s slow cinema advocate Lav Díaz and his extraordinary adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” in ‘Norte, The End Of History’; France released Alain Guiraudie’s Hitchcock influenced ‘Stranger by the lake’, an accomplished metaphor about AIDS, set in a gay cruising site where killings begin to occur; Belgian social realism legends the Dardenne Brothers with their latest ‘Two Days, One Night’ in which Marion Cotillard fights to convince her colleagues in a factory to vote for her staying in her job, even when that means they will lose their bonuses and, inspired by Turkish master Nuri Ceilan Bilge and his Cannes Palm D’Or winner, “Winter Sleep’.
Check all nominees’ trailers below and vote for your favourite here
IDA (Pawel Pawlikowski) |
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LEVIATHAN (Andrey Zvyagintsev) |
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MOMMY (Xavier Dolan) |
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NORTE, THE END OF HISTORY (Lav Díaz) |
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STRANGER BY THE LAKE (Alain Guiraudie) |
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TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne) |
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WINTER SLEEP (Nuri Ceylan Bilge) |