FSLC to Showcase International Films with FOREIGN AWARD HOPEFULS Series

The Film Society of Lincoln Center today announced And the Winner is: Foreign Award Hopefuls, celebrating films from around the world submitted for consideration in the Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language Film category, as well as the Golden Globes and other "awards season" Best-of lists by critics for film audiences. The film series will be held from January 3-6, 2013.

A total of 71 countries have submitted an official selection to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, representing a survey of some of the most interesting and distinctive films of the year. Chosen from that list, this group of films mixes well-established directors like Baltasar Kormakur and Chen Kaige with rising young filmmakers such as Rodrigo Pla, Aida Begic and Cate Shortland, big-screen epics like KON-TIKI from Norway and the whimsical Indian comedy BARFI!, with the more intimate storytelling of Argentine drama CLANDESTINE CHILDHOOD.

FSLC's Director of Programming, Year-Round, Robert Koehler, says, "And the Winner is: Foreign Award Hopefuls will offer New York City audiences an opportunity to experience and enjoy a wonderful cross-section of the films that were placed in the running to receive a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film from the Academy this year. They represent varying cultures, artistic visions and are among the best world cinema had to offer in 2012."

Tickets go on sale both at the box office and on-line Thursday, December 20.

Screenings will be held at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater (located at 165 West 65th Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway), unless otherwise noted. For additional information and to purchase tickets, go to Filmlinc.com.

BARFI! (2012) 151min
Director: Anurag Basu
Country: India
Rising Bollywood star Ranbir Kapoor gives a spectacular, endlessly inventive performance as a deaf-mute man whose life is a series of comic and tragic misadventures in this enchanting, one-of-a-kind fable produced by the Indian arm of the Walt Disney Company. Dedicated to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the nearly wordless BARFI! follows the resourceful title character as he falls in and out of love with the beautiful Shruti (Ileana D'Cruz), whose parents pressure her into a respectable arranged marriage. Later, he finds love again with the autistic Jhilmil (Priyanka Chopra), whose father plots to defraud her of a sizable trust fund, only for Shruti to unexpectedly reenter his life. In between, Barfi finds himself caught up in a bank robbery, two botched kidnappings and all other manner of slapstick mayhem, nimbly executed by writer-director Anurag Basu and cinematographer S. Ravi Varman (who bathes the film in rich, lustrous colors).
Screens Sunday, January 6 at 2:00PM

CAUGHT IN THE WEB (2012) 121min
Director: Chen Kaige
Country: China
Although veteran director Chen Kaige has made epics on Chinese dynastic history a specialty of his wide-ranging career, his newest movie shifts radically to our Internet-suffused present for a complex melodrama hinging on corporate intrigue and cyber-bullying. Faced with the dire prospect of advanced lymphatic cancer, a tycoon's executive assistant becomes the unsuspecting object of a web-fuelled hate campaign after an unfortunate incident on a public bus. The title's "web" actually suggests the film's many interconnected plot lines as a string of characters, linked by personal and business relationships and across class lines, react to each other's moves as if in a life-size chess match. The web may be virtual, but Chen's drama suggests its potential for good and ill at the level of everyday life.
Screens Sunday, January 6 at 7:00PM

CHILDREN OF SARAJEVO (Djeca) (2012) 90min
Director: Aida Begi?
Countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina
Winner of a special mention from the Un Certain Regard jury at last year's Cannes Film Festival, this shattering second feature from Bosnian director Aida Begi? (SNOW) traces the precarious fates of two orphaned siblings struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Balkan wars. Determined to make a better future for her 14-year-old brother Nedim, 23-year-old Rahima (played by the excellent Marija Piki?) works long hours in a restaurant and tries to show Nedim the solace she has found in her Muslim faith. But at school, Nedim is bullied by the son of a local politician, and when he decides to fight back, the incident triggers a chain of events that lead Rahima to discover that her young brother leads a double life.
Screens Sunday, January 6 at 5:00PM

CLANDESTINE CHILDHOOD (Infancia Clandestina) (2012) 110min
Director: Benjamín Ávila
Countries: Argentina
Set in 1979,12-year-old Juan (Teo Gutiérrez Moreno) and his family return to Argentina under false identities following years in exile. Juan's parents and his eccentric uncle Beto (scene-stealing Ernesto Alterio) are members of an underground resistance movement fighting against the Military Junta that rules the country. Their political activities make the threat of capture a constant concern. However, as seen through Juan's eyes, daily life is also full of warmth, humor and discovery, as he makes new friends at school (where he is known as "Ernesto"), including his first serious girlfriend. A Film Movement release.
Screens Friday, January 4 at 8:30PM

THE DEEP (Djúpið) (2012) 95min
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Countries: Iceland
Drawing from actual events as well as screenwriter Jon Atli Jonasson's one-hander stage play about a fisherman's seemingly impossible survival at sea, Iceland's most prolific filmmaker, Baltasar Kormákur, has created an unexpectedly and effectively low-key portrait of an Everyman under extraordinary circumstances. Although part of a rough-and-tumbled corps of hardy fishing folk, Gulli (Kormkur regular Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) finds himself the only survivor when the boat he's working on capsizes off Iceland's formidable coast. Immediately transformed into a national hero and the object of scientific curiosity, the character of Gulli clearly represents something special for Kormákur: a representative of a nation which itself has faced economic capsizing, and is now steadying the ship of state. A Focus World release.
Screens Saturday, January 5 at 6:30PM

THE DELAY (La demora) (2012) 84min
Director: Rodrigo Plá
Countries: Uruguay
By focusing on the lives of one struggling family in Montevideo, Mexican-based director Rodrigo Plá and his regular screenwriter Laura Santullo (LA ZONA, THE DESERT WITHIN) dramatize powerful universal truths in THE DELAY. Garment factory worker Maria (Roxana Blanco, in a stunning performance) labors to keep her cramped hearth and home together while raising kids, moonlighting with other work and handling her 80-year-old father Agustin (the unforgettable Carlos Vallarino), whose senility and habit for getting lost on the streets is becoming a major problem. One day, when Maria feels like she's reached her limit, she makes a rash, fateful decision that carries profound and possible life-altering consequences.
Screens Friday, January 4 at 6:30PM

KON-TIKI (2012) 118min
Directors: Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg
Countries: Norway
While living with his wife on the Polynesian island of Fatu Huku, anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl uncovers indications that the ancestors of the local Polynesian community may have originated not from Asia, as conventionally thought, but from South America. From this notion, Heyerdahl arranges what many think to be a fool's errand: traversing the Pacific from east to west with a small crew in a boat made of hemp similar to the original voyagers. Although Heyerdahl's 1947 adventure has been popularized in his own book and his self-made documentary, co-directors Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg (MAX MANUS) reframe the odyssey in grand, spectacular form, a big-screen epic that extends from the cosmic to the private relations among Heyderdahl's motley crew. The result is a movie that applies new filmmaking technology to the unlikely story of a near-Quixotic scientist using the most meager of methods. A Weinstein Company release.
Screens Saturday, January 5 at 8:30PM

LORE (2012) 109min
Director: Cate Shortland
Countries: Australia
The year is 1945. Hitler is dead and the War is over. But for one German family, the horror is just beginning. Left to fend for themselves after their Nazi parents are taken prisoner by the victorious Allies, 14-year-old Lore (played brilliantly by newcomer Saskia Rosendahl) and her four siblings leave home and begin a perilous journey towards their grandmother's house, 900 miles away in Hamburg. Along the way, the frightened, starving children meet up with a literal wandering Jew, a charismatic and somewhat mysterious young man namEd Thomas who puts his own life on the line to safeguard theirs in a way that contradicts everything they have been taught to believe. A Music Box Films release.
Screens Thursday, January 3 at 8:00PM

Screening Schedule for AND THE WINNER IS: FOREIGN AWARD HOPEFULS
Screening Venue:
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street

Thursday, January 3:
8:00PM LORE (109min)

Friday, January 4:
6:30PM THE DELAY (84min)
8:30PM CLANDESTINE CHILDHOOD (110min)

Saturday, January 5:
6:30PM THE DEEP (95m)
8:30PM KON-TIKI (118m)

Sunday, January 6:
2:00PM BARFI! (151min)
5:00PM CHILDREN OF SARAJEVO (90min)
7:00PM CAUGHT IN THE WEB (121min)

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