Capernaum 90 Capernaum is both the highest-grossing Middle-Eastern movie of all-time and the highest-grossing movie in Arabic of all-time.This Oscar-nominated masterpiece is about a 12-year-old kid in Lebanon who leaves his negligent parents and tries to make it in the streets on his own. It's a tale of grinding poverty as experienced by a boy with a good heart and more resilience than one can fathom.An acting tour de force by the child actors keeps the movie engaging throughout the grittiness and asks some hard questions about parental failures and parental love with the bigger regional political questions hovering silently in the background. Tough but ultimately uplifting – a movie to discuss. More On Amazon Drama Foreign 2018
Omar 72 Ask yourself how many Palestinian movies you have seen before. You will want to give this smart and twisty Academy Award nominee by Golden Globe winning director Hany Abu-Assad a chance to change your answer. Omar, a Palestinian baker, climbs the West Bank Wall to see his lover, Nadia, whom he wants to marry. When Israeli soldiers catch and humiliate him, he gets implicated in the shooting of an Israeli soldier, and eventually gets arrested and faces an extremely lengthy sentence. Later, his captors’ motives and his own get tangled up in politics, friendship, trust, and love. Omar is a highly realistic, compelling crime drama you don’t want to miss. More On Amazon Drama Foreign 2013
A Separation 97 Winner of an Oscar and a Golden Globe among endless accolades, A Separation is the much celebrated movie about an Iranian couple faced with the decision of leaving the country for better opportunities or staying to take care of a sick parent. If you’ve ever been curious about the humans of Iran beyond the politics, and by cultural extension, humans of Middle-Eastern countries, watch A Separation. But hold it, “An interesting foreign movie” is not how A Separation should be viewed (it’s not Slumdog Millionaire). As someone who grew up in a middle-class Muslim family, this film may be the only one to thoroughly portray many integral aspects of my upbringing. It perfectly depicts the delicate interaction between high moral standards and the realities of underdevelopment: how many bad people are only good people running out of options, and how parents raise their children in a shell of love and protection by keeping them away from the outside world while struggling to also introduce them to it. On a separate level, it also portrays how people live ready to have every privilege they have ever had revoked and how the constant need to “man up” transforms people, as well as the role of religion in all this. A Separation is my movie, not yours. And so I am asking you to watch this film the same way I’d want you to come visit and get to know my home country. More On Netflix Drama Foreign2 2011
