Films chosen for the 48th Annual International Film Festival include:

• March 2: Yesterday Girl (Abschied von gestern) is a film (Germany, 1966) directed by Alexander Kluge, one of the founders of the Young German Cinema movement. It is about an unruly heroine who becomes involved with conflicts in West German society after her escape from behind East Germany. Trying to break away from the hostility and misunderstanding of her parents generation, she discovers that conservatism and scarred memories thrive on both sides of the wall. The film was a nominee for the Golden Lion and winner of a Special Jury Prize at the 1966 Venice Festival.

• March 16: All my Good Countrymen (Vsichni dobri rodaci), directed by Vojtech Jasny, is one of the least-known wonders of the enormously creative Czech New Wave (Czechoslovakia, 1968). A group of unforgettable characters in a small Moravian village endure major trauma following the socialization of Czechoslovakia. Completed barely before the Soviet invasion in 1968, the film was immediately banned and never shown. Despite this, it won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival and is praised as a work of great lyricism, humor and originality. The New York Times labeled it a "masterpiece." "The film and the milieu it so precisely evokes are not so much nostalgic as they are powerfully remembered and irrevocably lost. [It] reflects the curdled fury of a former true believer," wrote J. Hoberman, the Village Voice).

• March 30: Mother Joan of the Angels (Matka Joanna od Aniolow) is a based-on-fact drama (Poland, 1961) set in a 17th-century Polish convent, where a priest investigates demonic possession among nuns. But he finds himself the object of the erotic cravings of the Mother Superior. Full of brilliant symbolism, director Jerzy Kawalerowicz weaves a powerful allegory of good vs. evil, chastity vs. eroticism. "A strange and absorbing film, the best of the new wave of Polish films to be seen here," wrote Hollis Alpert, Saturday Review. The film was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 1961 Cannes Festival.

• April 13: Electra, My Love (Szerelmem, Elektra) is a film (Hungary, 1974) by Miklos Jancso, one of the great political filmmakers, relocating the classic myth of Electra to a desolate Hungarian plain. The heroine partakes in an ancient ritual while awaiting her brother's return before avenging their father's murder. The film is shot as a visual epic, with elaborate camera movements that are Jancso's famous signature. It was labeled as "stunning" (Variety) and "dazzling." (Sight and Sound). The film was the winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Festival.

Continuing a tradition of bringing important and intriguing recent foreign and independent films to Missouri Southern are organizers of the Spring 2010 Contemporary Film Series. A brief discussion follows the screenings. These films are:

• February 6: Adoration (Canada, 2009; 101 mins.) is a film by director Atom Egoyan that with his characteristic depth and intensity probes the consequences that ensue when a high school boy writes a story that claims his father may have been a terrorist. As the film progresses, it implicates the boy, his family, his friends, his teacher and Internet chatroom partners in a web of deep feelings, deeply held opinions and secrets in a search for the truth that grows increasingly uncertain, ambiguous and mediated.

• February 26: Bright Star (UK/Australia/France, 2009; 119 mins.) is acclaimed director Jane Campion's fictionalized film treatment of the love affair between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Richard Jameson wrote of the firm: "Bright Star is the rare period movie to convey--without being insistent--what it was like to be alive in another era, the nature of houses and rooms and how people occupied them, the way windows linked spaces and enlarged people's lives and experiences, how fires warmed as the milky English sunlight did not....."

• March 12: Katyn (Poland, 2007; 121 mins.) is the latest film by Polish director Andrzej Wajda that follows the struggle of four fictional military officers and their families in search of the truth behind Stalin's liquidation of the 22,000-man Polish officer corps in Katyn Forest early in World War II. It was an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.

• March 19: Après Lui (France, 2007; 89 mins.) is a film directed by Gaël Morel about a mother who focuses on the surviving best friend of her 20-year-old son after he is killed in a car accident. It features what has been called one of the most "haunting," memorable and moving performances by the great Catherine Deneuve.

• April 16: You, the Living/Du Levande (Sweden, 2007; 86 mins.) is a film by director Roy Anderson that The New York Times has described as "a haunting black comedy constructed as a series of elaborately staged tableaux"; 57 of them, in fact, each reportedly requiring numerous test shootings, intricately interconnected but without traditional plot or main characters, but also "extremely funny." In the words of the director, "Living is so complicated to each one of us that the only thing that saves us is our sense of humor."

• April 30: Broken Embraces (Spain, 2009; 127 minutes) is the final film of the year. It stars Penelope Cruz as an actress who sacrifices everything for love. It was nominated for both a Golden Globe and Academy Award.

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