The 31^st edition of the American Film Institute’s European Union Film Showcase kicked off on Friday November 30. 49 new movies from 25 EU nations. Eleven of them are representing their countries in the Oscar Foreign Language Film category. Many more have won awards at international festivals. It is a yearly highlight for film fans of the Washington, DC area.

This year, instead of recapping the whole thing at the end, I’m biting off smaller pieces. In the opening weekend, I saw the following seven films.

Cold War (Zimna Wojna) by Pawel Pawlikowski – Poland

Pawlikowski’s Ida took the Oscar in 2013, and this sprawling romance, which recently earned the Foreign Language prize from the New York Film Critics Circle, will be a strong contender for another one. It is filmed in beautiful black and white by Ida cinematographer Lukasz Zal, and it boasts a dynamic performance from Joanna Kulig as Zula, a Polish girl fleeing a troubled past and finding some refuge in a choir being put together to showcase native Polish song and dance. She falls in love with the choir’s musical director, the older Victor (Tomasz Kot) and this kicks off an on again/off again romance that travels between Poland and Germany and France, tracing the political and social upheaval in the post-war era. Though short on narrative momentum and highly episodic, the emotional journey of the characters is enlivened by the ever-present music, from folk to jazz. Often wrenching, it remains more upbeat than Ida, though the story is thinner.

The Silent Revolution (Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer) by Lars Kraume – Germany

Imagine Dead Poet’s Society with serious political overtones and you have a good approximation of Kraume’s remembrance of a true-life act of defiance performed by teenage students in East Germany in 1956. In solidarity with Hungarian efforts to expel Soviet influence, these educated, well-off students observe two minutes of silence during their class. This seemingly small scale prank ruffles the wrong feathers, and soon great pressure is brought to bear on the students and their families to recant and inform on their co-conspirators. The highly complex nature of this time period, in which any protest of new communist governments could be positioned as being pro-Nazi, is effectively dramatized. And Kraume gets very strong performances from his group of mostly young actors.

Smuggling Hendrix by Marios Piperides – Cyprus

If The Silent Revolution was a politicized version of Dead Poet’s Society, it is easy to see this shaggy dog comedy as a political version of The Big Lebowski. Adam Bousdoukos is Yiannis, a disheveled would-be rock star who is tired of trying to navigate the bizarre nature of his divided island, in which Greeks and Turks live in uneasy disharmony. Yiannis has decided to leave, but his plans are derailed when his mutt, Jimi, scampers across the neutral zone into Turkish territory. Yiannis is free to travel across the line and find Jimi, but he is not allowed to bring the dog back. Thus begins an often funny series of schemes carried out with the reluctant help of a few characters Yiannis meets along the way, each as oddball as Yiannis. The Dude just wants his rug. Yiannis just wants his pooch. Though not as involved or quite as outright funny as Lebowski, Piperides uses his premise to arguably more logical effect – pointing out the absurdity of political and social realities in Cyprus through Yiannis’ noble quest.

Everybody Knows (Todos Los Saben) by Asghar Farhadi – Spain

Farhadi already has two Foreign Language film Oscars on his resume, and some critics (including the one you are currently reading) have him on the short list of greatest directors in the world today. Everybody Knows, which is not eligible for the Foreign Language Oscar, is his first movie in Spanish, and it boasts an all-star cast, including Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Ricardo Darin. Here, he is reworking material that he so brilliantly employed in About Elly, as a group of friends and family gather for a joyous occasion, only to have the sudden disappearance of one member of the party turn things very dark and disturbing. No one is better at plucking the threads of complex familial relationships and watching it all unravel when placed in a pressure cooker. The characters are sharp, the acting is smart. But I have to wonder if working outside of his native Iran takes just a bit of the incisiveness away from Farhadi’s examination of characters and social structures. The weakest of his more mature film, The Past, was the only other one set primarily in a European country (France), and both Everybody Knows and The Past veer ever so slightly into more exaggerated melodrama than do his movies set in Iran. We are still left with a riveting story and memorable characters, but perhaps not quite up to the standards of About Elly, A Separation and The Salesman.

Girl by Lukas Dhont – Belgium

The adjective “brave” gets tossed around a little easily in regard to actors, but it is hard to imagine a better word for what Victor Polster accomplishes in Girl. The 16-year-old dancer auditioned for a background part in Lukas Dhont’s debut movie, and so impressed the director that he offered Polster the lead. Never having acted before, Polster took on the role of Lara, a teenage girl in a boy’s body who is in the process of transitioning, while studying ballet and beginning a new school. The emotional and physical demands on Lara (and on Polster, who among other things, had to learn to dance on point) are extraordinary, and Lara, like a typical teenager, is largely reluctant to talk about what she is going through. That can at times make for some slow going, but at other times, it can create moments of almost unbearable heartbreak and tension. Girl is Belgium’s entry for the Oscars, and it has already won multiple international awards, including several at Cannes. One of them was an acting award for Polster. He couldn’t attend the ceremony. His school was in session.

(In the spirit of pairing these up with American counterparts, I will just note that this makes an excellent double feature with Eighth Grade.)

Euphoria (Euforia) by Valeria Golino – Italy

The weakest of a strong slate of opening movies, Golina’s second feature meanders a bit in telling the story of two very different brothers confronting a potentially fatal illness. Riccardo Scamarcio certainly brings a lot of verve and energy to the role of Matteo, the more flamboyant of the two brothers, but little else stands out as he tries to shepherd his dour brother Ettore (Valerio Mastandrea) through a brain tumor. More problematic than the iffy plot line is the apparent disinterest in some rather serious ethical issues relating medical care as portrayed here. Medical ethicists’ heads may explode at the somewhat strained plot machinations Golino uses to move the story along.

Black ’47 by Lance Daly – Ireland

From the worst to the best of the opening weekend. Daly’s is the first major release to tackle one of the seminal events in Irish history – the great famine from 1845-1849. John Ford attempted with no success to film Liam O’Flaherty’s seminal novel “Famine” back in the 1930s and ‘40s, and since then, the subject has been deemed too dark and difficult to tackle in a mainstream film. Daly confronts this issue by making a genre picture. This is a revenge action thriller which uses the famine as its backdrop. If you are looking for an American parallel, this shares a great deal of its structure with The Outlaw Josey Wales. But the famine is overwhelming, and the sense of cold, hunger, and despair is palpable throughout. James Frencheville (an Aussie) plays the avenging angel Feeney, who returns to a devastated homeland after fighting for the English. He seeks revenge on the those that betrayed his family while being pursued by a small posse of English soldiers. Frenchville, who boasts a terrifying silent stare, is ably supported by a strong cast including Hugo Weaving, Freddie Fox, Steven Rea, Barry Keoghan, and Jim Broadbent. The packed house in the AFI Silver’s 400 seat theatre 1, cheered at the conclusion, though it was cheering tempered by sadness at the realization that no one was triumphant in the great famine. As Irish ambassador Daniel Mulhall noted in an introduction to the film, the great famine is the genuine origin story for most of what constitutes Irish America today.

Titles on tap for the upcoming week include Estonia’s Take It or Leave It, Italy’s Dogman, and Romania’s I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians. Check back soon for more capsules.

Check out the rest of our series on the 2018 AFI EU Film Showcase:

• AFI 2018 European Union Film Showcase: Part Two
• AFI 2018 European Union Film Showcase: Part Three
• AFI 2018 European Union Film Showcase: Part Four