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1978 (Spanish)
During Argentina's 1978 World Cup final, a kidnapped group reveals its ties to a sinister cult, turning a secret detention center into hell on earth.
Director: Nicolás Onetti, Luciano Onetti
Starring: Agustin Olcese, Mario Alarcón, Agustin Pardella, Jorge Lorenzo, Paula Silva, María Eugenia Rigón
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A Man of Integrity (Farsi)
Reza, having distanced himself ferom the urban quagmire, leads a simple life along with his wife and young son, somewhere in a remote village in Northern Iran. He spends his days working on his goldfish farm. Nearby, a private company with close links to the government and local authorities, has taken control of nearly every aspect of regional life. Its shareholders, accumulating wealth, power and economic influence, have been pushing local farmers and small owners to sell off their belongings, farms and estates, to the benefit of the Company's influential network and its monopoly. It is under their pressure that many villagers have themselves become local links in the larger network of corruption.
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof
Starring: Reza Akhlaghirad, Soudabeh Beizaee, Nasim Adabi, Zeinab Shabani, Missagh Zareh, Zhila Shahi, Majid Potki
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As You Stood By (Korean)
Trapped by desperation and pushed beyond their limits, two women find themselves cornered by a brutal reality with no easy escape. As fear, betrayal, and survival collide, they begin to believe that murder may be the only answer left. Bound by a dangerous secret, they must decide how far they are willing to go before everything spirals out of control.
Director: Lee Jung-rim
Starring: Jeon So-nee, Lee Yoo-mi, Jang Seung-jo
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Days & Nights in the Forest - Criterion Collection (Bengali)
One of director Satyajit Ray's greatest achievements begins with the deceptively easy grace of a buddy comedy only to give way to darker moral shading. Seeking a weekend escape from the city, four friends from Kolkata embark on a driving trip to the countryside, where their urban entitlement and prejudices are gradually exposed. Among these young bachelors is the overconfident Ashim, who finds his self-assurance shaken by Aparna (the radiant Sharmila Tagore), an enigmatic young woman whose cool intellect conceals turbulent emotional depths. Filmed luminously amid the sound-dappled splendor of the woodlands of India's Palamu region, Days and Nights in the Forest deconstructs the masculine ego and India's fraught class divisions with elegant complexity.
Director: Satyajit Ray
Starring: Sharmila Tagore, Kaberi Bose, Simi Garewal, Soumitra Chatterjee
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Drunken Birds (Spanish)
Marlena is the young wife of a powerful cartel boss, and Willy is her secret lover. Fearing for their safety, the two flee separately from Mexico in hopes of someday being reunited. Willy suspects that Marlena is hiding in Montreal, so he heads to Quebec. There he gets hired as a seasonal worker but soon becomes embroiled in growing tensions among the migrant laborers at the farm. Includes Forced English subtitles.
Director: Ivan Grbovic
Starring: Antonio Guerrero, Helene Florent, Claude Legault, Marine Johnson
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Exit 8 (Japanese)
Based on the global hit video game. A man is trapped in an endless subway corridor and must follow a set of rules in order to escape. A single oversight will send him back to the beginning. Will he ever exit this infinite nightmare?
Director: Genki Kawamura
Starring: Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kochi, Naru Asanuma, Kotone Hanase, Nana Komatsu, Reo Soda
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Genie, Make a Wish (Korean)
When an emotionally unpredictable spirit named Genie is suddenly awakened from his mysterious lamp, his chaotic charm collides with the cold and emotionless world of Ki Ka-Young. Granted three wishes, she reluctantly enters a magical journey filled with unexpected twists, heartfelt moments, and hilarious chaos. As their lives intertwine, both discover that the wishes they truly need may not be the ones they asked for. Includes all 13 episodes.
Director: Ahn Gil-ho
Starring: Kim Woo-Bin, Bae Suzy, Ahn Eun-jin, Noh Sang-hyun, Ko Kyu-pil, Lee Joo-young
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Green is the New Red (Spanish)
Through a critical recounting of Operation Condor the coordinated campaign of political repression across Latin America in the 1970s filmmaker Anna Recalde Miranda traces the roots of Paraguay's current ecological disaster. Under the country's right-wing dictatorship, dissidents were subjected to surveillance, torture, kidnappings, assassinations, and land grabs, abuses documented in the Archives of Terror. These crimes are also etched into Paraguay's vast soy fields, sprayed with agrochemicals for multinational corporations. The soil itself bears witness to ecological collapse, displaced Indigenous peoples, and landless farmers. Green Is the New Red connects land sovereignty and human rights, revealing how historical violence paved the way for today's environmental devastation. In Spanish, Portuguese, Guarani and English with optional English and Spanish subtitles.
Director: Anna Recalde Miranda
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In the Last Days of the City (Arabic)
The debut feature of filmmaker Tamer El Said tells the fictional story of a filmmaker from downtown Cairo as he struggles to capture the soul of a city on edge while facing loss in his own life. Shot in Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad, and Berlin during the two years before the outbreak of revolution in Egypt, the film's multi-layered stories are a visually rich exploration of friendship, loneliness, loss, and life in cities shaped by shadows of war and adversity. Includes Forced English subtitles.
Director: Tamer El Said
Starring: Khalid Abdalla, Laila Samy, Hanan Youssef
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Jujji (Urdu)
Two officers, one idealistic, one cynical pursue a brutal serial killer. As they close in on the elusive Jujji, their inner conflicts rise to the surface, exposing inner demons and challenging their notions of justice and morality.
Director: Habib Shahzad
Starring: Mustafa Rizvi, Anjum Habibi, Muhammad Arslan, Shabir Kahan, Mazhar Malik
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Kraken (Norwegian)
About a marine biologist investigating strange occurrences in Norway's deepest fjord.
Director: Pål Øie
Starring: Sara Khorami, Mikkel Bratt Silset, Ingvild Holthe Bygdnes, Oyvind Brandtzaeg
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My Sunshine (Japanese)
One winter on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, a young boy named Takuya has resigned himself to the fact that he's the worst player on his ice hockey team. While practicing, he becomes transfixed by the figure skaters who share the ice rink, particularly Sakura, a rising star from Tokyo. Her coach, Arakawa, takes an interest in Takuya, seeing himself in the young boy. He pairs the two up and trains them as a competitive ice-dancing duo. Although tentative with each other at first, the kids eventually grow closer and form a deep bond with their supportive coach. But as the winter continues, unspoken feelings begin to surface and the harmony the trio once knew begins to falter.
Director: Hiroshi Okuyama
Starring: Keitatsu Koshiyama, Kiara Nakanishi, Sôsuke Ikematsu
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Nouvelle Vague - Criterion Collection (French)
It's 1959, and a young Jean-Luc Godard is the only one among his film-critic peers at Cahiers du cinéma not to have made a feature film. Determined to put his revolutionary cinematic ideas into practice, he brings his small crew and two stars an eager unknown named Jean-Paul Belmondo and wary Hollywood expat Jean Seberg onto the streets of Paris to shoot Breathless, an adventure in unfettered creativity that would soon upend the way movies are made. With this enthralling love letter from one cinematic maverick to another, director Richard Linklater captures, with buoyant humor and effortless charm, the intoxicating joy of being young, breaking all the rules, and making art without boundaries. In French and English with optional English SDH subtitles.
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Guillaume Marbeck, Aubry Dullin, Zoey Deutch
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Old Town Girls (Mandarin)
High school girl living with her father and stepmother is visited by her biological mother, who left her soon after birth. They gradually reconcile, but the mother has a heavy debt. Includes Forced English subtitles.
Director: Yu Shen
Starring: Regina Wan, Gengxi Li, Jue Huang
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Scarlet (Japanese)
After failing at her mission and finding herself gravely injured in the "Otherworld," she encounters an idealistic young man from our present day who not only helps her to heal but shows her the possibility of a future free of bitterness and rage. When confronted again by her father's killer, Scarlet faces her most daunting battle: can she break the cycle of hatred and find meaning in life beyond revenge?
Director: Mamoru Hosoda
Starring: Mana Ashida, Masaki Okada, Koji Yakusho, Masachika Ichimura
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Shoah - Criterion Collection (French)
Over a decade in the making, Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour-plus opus is a monumental investigation of the unthinkable: the murder of more than six million Jews by the Nazis. Using no archival footage, Lanzmann instead focuses on first-person testimonies (of survivors and former Nazis, as well as other witnesses), employing a circular, free-associative method in assembling them. The intellectual yet emotionally overwhelming Shoah is not a film about excavating the past but an intensive portrait of the ways in which the past is always present, and it is inarguably one of the most important cinematic works of all time.
Director: Claude Lanzmann, Guillaume Ribot
Starring: Simon Srebrnik, Richard Glazar, Filip Müller, Raul Hilberg, Abraham Bomba, Claude Lanzmann
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Spanish)
The film centers on a basic premise: near Lima, Peru, at noon on Friday, 20 July 1714, a bridge woven by the Incas a century earlier collapsed at that particular moment while five people were crossing it: Doña María, the Marquess of Montemayor; Pepita, her lady in attendance; Esteban, a scribe; Uncle Pío; and a young child. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan friar on his way to cross it, witnessed the collapse. Curious about why God would allow such a tragedy, he takes a scientific approach. He set out to interview everyone who knew the five victims. Over six years, he has compiled a vast book, questioning whether we live our lives according to a plan or if there is no such thing as a bigger scheme.
Director: Mary McGuckian
Starring: F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel
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The Currents (Spanish)
While visiting Switzerland to accept an award for her work in the fashion industry, Argentinian designer Lina is seized by the sudden urge to jump off a bridge into an icy river. She survives the plunge and returns to Buenos Aires; she tells no one of the incident, yet a transformation has taken place within her. Left with a paralyzing fear of water, Lina finds it impossible to readjust to her former identity as a wife, mother, and artist. She distances herself from her husband and career, growing increasingly isolated and fragile as she confronts long-buried existential questions. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler, The Currents is a quietly gripping psychological mystery with dreamlike, hallucinatory threads that weave a portrait of a woman on the verge of unraveling.
Director: Milagros Mumenthaler
Starring: Isabel Aime Gonzalez-Sola, Mauricio Bertorello, Sara Bessio, Esteban Bigliardi, Jazmín Carballo
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The Owners (Czech)
A timely metaphor for failing democracy, The Owners takes a seriocomic look at the most local form of self-governance: the co-op apartment building meeting. It includes a curious cast of characters, all of whom own apartments in the same building in Prague, as they attempt to tolerate each other's presence long enough to make some important decisions about the building's future. Mrs. Zahrádková wants to save the old crumbling house she shares with other owners of the flats located in it. She might find supporters for her plan in young newlyweds with their idealistic enthusiasm, who have just moved in and are astonished by the co-owners' inability to agree on anything. Mrs. Zahrádková wants to save the old crumbling house she shares with other owners of the flats located in it. She might find supporters for her plan in young newlyweds with their idealistic enthusiasm, who have just moved in and are astonished by the co-owners' inability to agree on anything. Mrs. Roubíčková vigilantly controls the proper course of the meeting, not allowing the slightest deviation from the rules; Mrs. Procházková and her proclaimed business partner Mr. Novak are looking for ways to increase the value of their property, including by subletting an apartment to African students; Mr. Nitranský tries to get hold of the attic to expand his flat; and frustrated Mr. Kubát sabotages any decision.
Director: Jiri Havelka
Starring: Tereza Ramba, Vojta Kotk, Dagmar Havlova, Jiri Labus
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The Secret Agent - Criterion Collection (Portuguese)
With an electrifying blend of kinetic punch and elegiac historical sweep, Kleber Mendonça Filho connects life under Brazil's twentieth-century military dictatorship to the living present, delivering a kaleidoscopic period thriller pulsing with resonance. In 1977, under the alias Armando, a man arrives in the city of Recife to try to make a fresh start with his young son. However, the threat of violence immediately encroaches, while around him swirl corrupt cops, grimy hit men, haunted exiles, and a wild urban legend that ignites a public frenzy. Continually spinning off its temporal and narrative axes, The Secret Agent unfurls an epic canvas teeming with life and love for those who refuse to submit to systems of oppression.
Director: Kleber Mendonca Filho
Starring: Wagner Moura, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Candido, Tania Maria, Udo Kier
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Two Prosecutors - Criterion Collection (Russian)
Summoned with a blood-written note smuggled out of a prison block, an idealistic Soviet prosecutor pushes past the jail's leery authorities to interview elderly, broken-down Bolshevik condemned as a political undesirable. The young attorney, determined to expose this miscarriage of justice to the authorities in Moscow, soon finds his efforts stymied as an ever-tightening net of suspicion encircles his investigation. Set at the height of the Great Purge and drenched in the paranoia of Stalin's police state, the latest triumph from director Sergei Loznitsa is a chilling, Kafkaesque thriller about the impunity of power and the matter-of-fact horrors of totalitarianism.
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Starring: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Alexander Filippenko, Anatoliy Beliy
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Mercer County Library System
2751 Brunswick Pike Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648 609-882-9246
https://mcl.org
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