Author: Deborah Young

La Grazia

Toni Servillo shines in a memorable, tragi-comic performance as the president of Italy in Paolo Sorrentino’s crowd-pleasing Venice opener ‘La Grazia’, an often funny, sometimes moving tale of the Numero Uno’s loneliness, inner doubts and obsessions and his inability to make up his mind on difficult legislation like euthanasia.

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Têtes Brûlées

 A sensitive and emotionally intimate exploration of cultural identity amidst grief, ‘Têtes Brûlées’ recounts how a 12-year-old girl from a Tunisian family living in Brussels loses her beloved brother, in Maja-Ajmia Yde Zellama’s stereotype-shattering debut feature.

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Yalla Parkour

When documaker Areeb Zuaiter in the U.S. stumbles across the Internet videos of daredevil Ahmad, a teenage parkour athlete in Gaza, they begin a heartfelt long-distance friendship that becomes entwined with the filmmaker’s sense of belonging to her mother’s Palestinian homeland, in the fascinating and revealing meeting of worlds, Yalla Parkour.

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