late fall 2009 series

It happens every year with the Academy Awards. Films are nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film that you've never even heard of, much less, seen. Clips from the films are shown, which look intriguing, but that's hardly the same as seeing the films in their entirety. As it turns out, some of these films are never released in the US, or are released after the awards show. The latter was the case this year, when three of the nominated titles, including the Oscar winner, received limited theatrical releases this summer.

While we can't help you with the Oscar office pool, we can at least fill in the gaps of your foreign film viewing by bringing three of the nominees from last February's Oscars: an Austrian film that looks into the world of prostitutes and desperation, an historically-based German film about political resistance and anti-war revolutionaries, and the winner of the 2008 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, Departures, a Japanese film that meditates on death, society, and the cello. Don't miss what might be your only chance to see the films that were deemed the best from around the world by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a sprawling look at the infamous left wing collective The Red Army Faction who terrorized 1970s Germany with a wave of assassinations, bank robberies, kidnappings, and bombings. Shot with a verite style and a raucous musical score, the film is packed with action, and much of the dialogue is adapted verbatim from interviews and media during the Faction's reign of terror: the elaborate historical re-creation of 1970s Germany is one of the film's great successes.

A meditation on life and the meaning of death, Departures tells the story of Daigo Kobayashi, a recently unemployed cellist who embarks on a new career of preparing corpses for burial, or "Nokanshi." While some of his friends shun him for accepting such a "low-caste" position, Daigo soon realizes that the work is important, and necessary, and begins to take pride in his work and perfect the art, acting as a gatekeeper between the living and the dead, the departed and those they leave behind.

And Austrian filmmaker Gotz Spielmann gives us in Revanche a thriller about Alex, an ex-con and pimp's assistant who falls in love with one of the hookers, a Ukranian woman named Tamara. Alex plans to take Tamara and substitute the trappings of the sex industry with a normal life, but the bank heist that would have financed their escape goes awry and leaves them grappling with the lost dream of a better life.