FOREIGN FILM SERIES
ADMISSION
Season subscription only.
$30 for the entire season, plus 3 free guest passes.
To pay by check, please print and mail an ORDER FORM.
Students are admitted FREE with Parkside ID on Sundays at 5 pm.
SCREENINGS
Thursday | 7:30 pm
Friday | 7:30 pm
Saturday | 5 pm and 8 pm
Sunday | 2 pm and 5 pm
SWITCHING POLICY
Switching to a different showtime is allowed and will be accommodated if possible. No prior notice is required.
VENUE
Student Center Cinema
900 Wood Rd.
Kenosha, WI 53144
Parking: Lot A
MORE INFO: MPAA ratings | Reviews | Film History Database
Foreign language films are subtitled, and subtitles are used on English language films when available.
Drive My Car
Japan | 2021 | Ryûsuke Hamaguchi | Japanese language | 179 mins
Sep 15-18, 2022
Two years after his wife's unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari, a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production's premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koshi Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke's late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind. Nominated for four Academy Awards, Drive my Car is a complex and elegiac film about love and mourning, art as a means of relieving personal trauma, and the persistence of pain. IMDb
Minari
Korea | 2020 | Lee Isaac Chung | Korean language | 115 mins
Sep 22-25, 2022
Told with the rugged tenderness of a Flannery O’Connor novel but aptly named for a resilient Korean herb that can grow wherever it is planted, Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical Minari is a raw and vivid story of two simultaneous assimilations; it is the story of a family assimilating into a country but also the story of a man assimilating into his family. Gentle as the stream that flows through the Yi’s property, and yet powerful enough to reverberate for generations to come, Chung’s loving — and immensely lovable — immigrant drama interrogates the American Dream with the hard-edged hope of a family that needs to believe in something before they lose all faith in each other. Tracking its Korean-American heroes as they relocate from California to Arkansas in order to start over, Minari works quietly and methodically, embracing its lush rural setting with striking glimpses of its characters alone against vast and empty landscapes. IMDb
Belfast
United Kingdom | 2021 | Kenneth Branagh | English language | 98 min
Oct 6-9, 2022
Famed actor and director Kenneth Branagh’s autobiographical project is a sentimental look back at his youth and the connection to his career as a filmmaker. Belfast depicts a violent, tumultuous time in Northern Ireland, but it does so through the innocent, exuberant eyes of a nine-year-old boy. In recalling his youthful days in an insular neighborhood in the titular city, Branagh has made a film that is both intimate and ambitious. Belfast tears at the heart-strings and will bring back memories of people’s own migration stories. Despite the grim facts of the story, Belfast is full of light and laughter and positively glows with warmth and the love of hearth and home. Belfast shows that even in the darkest of times, there is light to be found. IMDb
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
Bhutan | 2019 | Pawo Choyning Dorji | Dzongkha language | 110 min
Oct 20-23, 2022
Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom is a sweet, understated, and wistfully beautiful film about an antsy young cynic sent to teach in the most remote schoolhouse on Earth. He is ordered to Lunana to fulfill his national service. He soon finds himself improvising, using charcoal on the walls since there is no blackboard. He teaches nursery rhymes in Dzongkha and math in English. The film invites us to imagine interior lives, a narrowing of the pursuit of happiness to tasks at hand, modest goals, music, food, and love. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom captures the juxtaposition of big-city living and small-town surviving in a way that resonates beyond its cultural specificity. IMDb
Two of Us
France | 2019 | Fillippo Meneghetti | French language | 99 min
Nov 3-6, 2022
There are countless real-life cases in regional towns all over the world of mature male and female couples in communities unaware that what passes for friendship is actually a long-term committed gay relationship. A variation on that scenario forms the heart of Filippo Meneghetti’s terrific debut feature, Two of Us. Driven by a powerhouse, impassioned performance from Barbara Sukowa and one of contrastingly delicate brushstrokes by Martine Chevallier, the drama begins as a gentle love story and then takes a series of unpredictable turns as the clandestine life partners are separated by an unfortunate circumstance. The film transitions from tender romance into penetrating sorrow before taking on notes of mordant humor and unexpected quasi-thriller elements. Beautifully filmed, with an assured grasp of framing as a storytelling tool, this is a quality film that should connect especially with older art house and LGBTQ audiences. IMDb
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Romania | 2021 | Radu Jude | Romanian language | 106 mins
Nov 17-20, 2022
The brilliance of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romanian director Radu Jude’s astonishing satire, comes from a most unusual combination of two very different kinds of movies that should not work in harmony but end up making perfect sense. The film begins as the story of a sex tape gone wrong, with circumstances unfolding at the center on the restless streets of Bucharest, as the frantic problems of a schoolteacher and the community divided against her take place against much larger concerns. The film is divided into three parts, beginning with the illicit recording, which Jude might easily have left to audiences’ imaginations, and building to an impromptu people’s tribunal wherein the parents decide the humiliated teacher’s fate. IMDb
Undine
Germany | 2020 | Christian Petzold | German language | 91 mins
Dec 1-4, 2022
The myth of Undine, the water nymph who has to kill her lover should he ever betray her, gets a twenty-first century German makeover courtesy of director Christian Petzold. Undine (Paula Beer), in her mid-twenties, works as a freelance guide for the Senate Administration for Urban Development in central Berlin. Before giving her usual talk about all the drastic changes that have occurred in the capital over the centuries, her lover Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) breaks up with her on the terrace of a café across the street from her work. The two scenes, in quick succession, could not be more different. The highly professional Undine proves to be someone completely different from the scorned woman. Undine is a lush, transporting affair whose enigmatic magic slowly washes over viewers. Petzold never makes entirely clear that Undine is rooted in the supernatural, until moments of magical realism come creeping in. IMDb
Riders of Justice
Denmark | 2020 | Anders Thomas Jensen | German language | 91 mins
Jan 26-29, 2023
Riders of Justice follows a recently-deployed soldier named Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), who is forced to return home to care for his teenage daughter after his wife is killed in a tragic train accident. However, when a survivor of the wrecked train surfaces claiming foul play, Markus begins to suspect his wife was murdered and embarks on a revenge-fueled mission to find those responsible. Deliriously wry and so perfectly balanced it should become a case study in script classes, Riders of Justice may be the film that finally gives Anders Thomas Jensen international recognition beyond his usual spotlight as a sought-after screenwriter. Comparisons with the Coen brothers will be inevitable, given oddball characters whose fixations and genuine heart contrast with moments of extreme violence. Riders of Justice is salty, violent, transgressive, button-pushing, and laugh-out-loud funny at times. IMDb
Limbo
United Kingdom | 2020 | Ben Sharrock | English language | 104 mins
Feb 9-12, 2023
In Limbo, director Ben Sharrock presents a number of refugees from Syria and elsewhere—single men with no families—who have been relocated in grimly functional hostels with a bare-minimum subsistence allowance. Forbidden to do any paid work, they must simply wait for the official word on whether they can stay. The situation is taken broadly from real life. Sharrock superbly suggests the growing atmosphere of fear and anger that hovers like cloud cover: the men believe that they are deliberately kept in this stage of depression and desperation so that they will crack and ask to be sent home. Their contact with the state comes in the form of the drolly dramatized lectures they receive from two officials, Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Boris (Kenneth Collard), who tell them how to apply for menial jobs over the phone and the correct, respectful way to behave with women while dancing with them at a nightclub—a particularly bizarre instruction as these poor lonely men will never get near anything as exciting as that. Limbo manages to turn its downbeat scenario into a sweet and touching rumination on the quest to belong in an empty world. IMDb
The Worst Person in the World
Norway | 2021 | Joachim Trier | Norwegian language | 128 mins
Feb 23-26, 2023
A chaotic, unpredictable portrait of a chaotic, unpredictable individual, The Worst Person in The World is a spirited and thrillingly uninhibited piece of filmmaking from Joachim Trier. The film is about the life and loves of a restless thirty-year-old woman named Julie (Renate Reinsve), who is funny and skittishly unsure of herself as she begins a relationship with an established and admired comic book artist, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). Trier breaks his film up into twelve chapters, using an occasional authorial voiceover to narrate Julie’s actions with witty distance. The device allows the film to jump from scene to scene with ease and permits a sketchy cast of supporting characters to have their impact, among them Julie’s estranged father and Aksel’s squabbling family. Juggling slightly altered tones in each chapter, the director also employs several surprising cinematic tricks, such as short bursts of animation, a lovely sequence detailing a wobbly mushroom trip, and a memorable freeze-frame scene when Julie pauses the action to run through the city to meet a new lover. This is a film of unfolding delights, providing a terrific canvas for the actors. IMDb
Bergman Island
France | 2021 | Mia Hansen-Løve | English language | 112 mins
Mar 9-12, 2023
In Mia Hansen-Løve’s drama, a pair of relationships play out in tandem, each one influencing the other in elegant and subtle ways. Anthony Sanders (Tim Roth) is an acclaimed British director and admirer of Ingmar Bergman. He and his partner Chris (Vicky Krieps), who is a filmmaker herself, go on a writing retreat to the Swedish island of Fårö. They stay at Bergman’s own house and even sleep in the bed from his 1973 masterpiece Scenes From a Marriage. The couple is hardly on the brink of splitting, but there is an amicable coolness to their relationship that suggests they have settled into comfortable roles. Delicate, droll, and imbued with a haunting, understated wistfulness, Bergman Island wears its layers so lightly it may take a while to notice just how much is going on. Parenthood, relationships, and the creative process: three key elements of the cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve casually combine in Bergman Island, a playfully self-aware meta-portrait of the filmmaker and, indeed, of filmmaking itself. IMDb
Compartment Number. 6
Russia | 2021 | Juho Kuosmanen | Russian language | 107 mins
Mar 16-19, 2023
Compartment Number 6 concerns Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish grad student in Moscow who has planned a trip to a remote city in the Arctic Circle to see some petroglyphs. This idea is championed by her Russian lover Irina, but we quickly get the sense that there is a growing distance between them. As Laura contemplates her journey in silence, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) bursts into the compartment and into Laura’s space. A slow friendship develops between the two, as they start to begrudgingly see each other beyond first impressions. When it seems like Laura’s visit to see the petroglyphs is in jeopardy, Ljoha comes to the rescue, setting up a glorious romp in inclement weather. This is a melancholic drama but also one that’s unexpectedly uplifting in its insights into human solitude and connection. Loosely adapted from Rosa Liksom’s novel, the film blithely disregards the standard rulebook for this kind of road movie in which two strangers with little in common slowly come to understand and respect one another. A version of that does happen, but it is not via the usual avenues of sexual attraction or even friendship in any formulaic sense. The connection is more about understanding that they are not so different. IMDb
Parallel Mothers
Spain | 2021 | Pedro Almodóvar | Spanish language | 123 mins
Mar 30-Apr 2, 2023
Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, which opened the 78th Venice Film Festival, tells the story of two women, both single mothers, who give birth to baby daughters at virtually the same moment. The two mothers meet for the first time when they are paired together in a room in a Madrid maternity ward. Janis (Penelope Cruz) is a confident woman near forty who is full of joy and optimism for the future; Ana (Milena Smit) is a scared teenager fearful of everything that lies ahead for herself and her newborn. Neither mother-to-be has a father by her side. Parallel Mothers is a film of cascading twists and turns, thickening complication, and high family drama, a moving tribute to the shifting, ever-bending bonds of motherhood. IMDb
The Truffle Hunters
Italy | 2020 | Michael Dweck | Italian language | 84 mins
Apr 13-16, 2023
The Truffle Hunters takes viewers deep in the forests of Northern Italy where elderly men and their indispensable dogs participate in the tradition of sniffing out the elusive white Alba truffle. Beloved by gourmet chefs, the truffle’s rarity drives prices sky-high, even as the subjects of the film maintain the old ways of hunting, free of technology, relying on their own memories and a cranky sense of secrecy. Like many who spend hours alone in the woods, their character tends to be eccentric, but to step away from the anxieties of 2020 and spend time in their irascible company is a tonic for the soul, a tranquil visit to a vanishing way of life attuned to nature. Directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw paint a loving portrait of the entire ecosystem of truffle hunting, focusing on the hunters but also showing the dealers, auctioneers, and chefs who vie for the choicest truffles. IMDb
An update from Norm Cloutier
Director, Foreign Film Series
Dear Patrons,
After 39 years, I have decided to step down as director of the UW-Parkside Foreign Film Series at the end of the spring 2022 season.
I would like to thank all my UW-Parkside colleagues who helped make this program such a success, in particular, my current colleagues Joe Benson (Associate Professor – English) and Betty Petersen (Program Assistant) who were invaluable in keeping the FFS operating over the last two years, and who are committed to providing our community with quality foreign film programming going forward; Don Kummings (English) and Richard Rosenberg (Economics) who helped start the FFS; all the UW-Parkside administrators who were so supportive of the FFS over the years, from Chancellor Alan Guskin who took a chance on the idea in 1982, to Chancellor Debbie Ford and Dean Lesley Heins-Walker (College of Arts and Humanities), who could not have been more supportive and remain committed to the program; and all the support staff, including Student Center administrators and student ticket takers and projectionists.
Most important, I would like to thank you, all the FFS patrons who have remained loyal to the program in good times and in times of stress. In 1995, when we decided to switch to 35mm projection, you came through with financial support and helped keep the program self-sustaining.
Currently, despite more recent generous support we have received from many patrons, Covid and the free online films we have offered over the last year and half have put a serious dent in the fiscal health of the program. In recognition of my departure, I would be eternally grateful if you made a contribution by visiting the Support the Foreign Film Series page.
I hope to see you at the last film of the season!
Sincerely,
Norm Cloutier
SUPPORT AFFORDABLE ACCESS TO FOREIGN FILM
We are proud to offer 14 foreign films for one very low subscription price. However, providing this program – film licensing fees along with mailing and labor cost – is increasingly expensive.
To help us defray the cost of the program, and to ensure that we can keep the subscription price low, we are seeking additional support from patrons who are able to chip in. Donations can be made online or by mail.
Instructions for making a donation by mail
Make out a check to “UW-Parkside”, write “FFS” in the memo line, and mail it to:
UW-Parkside Foreign Film Series
900 Wood Road
Kenosha, WI 53141
Please, no cash donations.
EXCHANGE POLICY
We understand that patrons may need to see a film at an alternative time. Switching to a different showtime is allowed and under normal circumstances will be accommodated; it requires no prior notice, but patrons are encouraged to switch to our least crowded screenings if possible, Saturday 8 pm and Sunday 5 pm.
ONLINE BOX OFFICE
Admission is based on season subscription only. Tickets are not available for individual films, but at $2 per film, a season pass is an outstanding entertainment bargain. In addition, all season ticket holders receive three free guest passes.
We recommend that you order your season tickets as soon as possible. Our most popular show times (Thursday 7:30 pm, Friday 7:30 pm, and Saturday 5:00 pm) have sold out for a number of years running.
MPAA Ratings
The UW-Parkside Foreign Film Series does not provide ratings generated by the Motion Picture Association of America. Many foreign films have not received ratings from the MPAA, and the rating system itself may not reflect the sensibilities of our patrons.
For FFS patrons who are interested in taking children to one of our films, we recommend that they visit kids-in-mind for more information about a film's violence, sex, and profanity content. This site, however, does not include films that have not received a MPAA rating. In those cases where MPAA ratings are not available we encourage patrons to read reviews.
Reviews
All films in this year's program have been linked to an external review. Patrons who would like to read alternative reviews are encouraged to visit online review search engines. Here are three online resources that we recommend:
Internet Movie Database Movie Review Query Engine Rotten Tomatoes
Questions?
Betty Petersen
peterseb@uwp.edu
Location
Student Center, Ground Floor
900 Wood Rd.
Kenosha, WI 53144
Parking: Lot A
About The Rita
The UW-Parkside Foreign Film Series is a program of the College of Arts and Humanities and is included in the array of arts and cultural programming bearing the Rita name. Despite the film screenings taking place outside of the walls of the Rita Tallent Picken Regional Center for Arts & Humanities, we are proud to be counted among the the state-of-the-art instructional facilities, stunning performance venues, and award-winning academic programs that serve our community. Learn more about The Rita.