Five international movies to stream now

Scarlet Camilo in “Boca Chica” (2023). (pragda.com via Selene Films)

By DEVIKA GIRISH

‘Milisuthando’

South African artist and filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela had never really encountered racism until she was 9 years old — or so she thought. Born in 1985, Bongela was raised in the Transkei, one of South Africa’s many Bantustans: segregated regions that the apartheid government claimed conferred autonomy on the country’s native Black population, when in fact, they only entrenched white control of the land and ideas about racial purity. After apartheid was outlawed, and the Transkei was dissolved in 1994, Bongela and her family moved to Cape Town, where she experienced a mixed community for the first time — and what it felt like to be perceived as “different.”

In “Milisuthando,” a stunningly poetic reflection on her history and that of her nation, Bongela tries to untangle the complex, often contradictory feelings that characterized her upbringing. There was an idyllic quality to her childhood environment, yet, as she realized only later, it was rooted in a deeply internalized sense of racial inferiority and parochialism, whose enduring traces she uncovers through interviews with her older relatives. “I have to ask dangerous questions,” she says in the lyrical voice-over that ties together the film’s cascade of archival materials, home videos and scenes of performance. Across five chapters, beginning with her birth and ending with the making of this very film with Marion Isaacs, a white South African friend and producer, Bongela does exactly that, examining her memories, her relationships and her own convictions to ascertain what it means to really, truly belong. (Stream it on Criterion Channel.)

‘Guardians of the Formula’

Dragan Bjelogrlic’s drama is set in 1958, in the midst of the global arms race, as various countries rushed to develop nuclear weapons to consolidate their geopolitical positions in the Cold War. But unlike the typical thrillers set in the era, like Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” “Guardians of the Formula” (also inspired by a true story) is concerned less with the making of the bomb and more with the terrible cost of that race — and those who dedicated themselves to cleaning up its lethal messes. The movie opens in a lab in France, where Georges Mathé (Alexis Manenti), a professor, is experimenting with mice to find a cure for exposure to radiation. Success still eludes him when he’s enlisted to treat a group of Yugoslavian physicists who suffered an accident at a nuclear research institute near Belgrade.

Mathé is ethically opposed to the atomic bomb and reluctant to help those involved in its making, but he’s also driven by a commitment to scientific progress — and to saving lives. The leader of the Yugoslav cohort, professor Dragoslav Popovic (Radivoje Bukvic), is battling his own demons while his cells battle the effects of radiation; in flashbacks, we see how state pressure (and his own obsession with cracking the code) made him put himself and his students in danger. These two prodigious scientists, one tasked with facilitating death and the other with keeping it at bay, become the two poles that structure this handsomely shot and tautly edited film. But the movie’s real heroes are ordinary people: the working-class French people who volunteer to participate in Mathé’s experimental bone marrow transplants — the first to be performed on humans — and take on great risk for the sake of complete strangers. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘Swim to Me’

There’s something strangely sedate about Estela (María Paz Grandjean), the protagonist of Dominga Sotomayor’s unsettling Chilean domestic drama. A housekeeper for a wealthy couple in Santiago, Estela seems to be sleepwalking through her duties, which mainly involve caring for the couple’s 6-year-old girl, Julia (Rosa Puga Vittini). Estela takes Julia to swimming lessons; entertains her tantrums; helps her artist mother do her hair and pick shoes for fancy galas; and gives up her off days with no complaint whenever Julia’s father, a doctor, is called to go to the hospital on short notice. She does all of this with a sense of dissociation, as if dazed by how different, and indeed superficial, this world of money and comforts is compared to her rural, working-class upbringing and life.

But a sense of unease bubbles underneath her placidity. Slowly, suspensefully, Sotomayor introduces sudden shifts into Estela’s life. A romance with a handsome but mysterious gas-station attendant. A dog that sneaks into her employers’ yard and wreaks havoc. A string of burglaries in the neighborhood. An illness that plagues Estela’s mother, with whom she speaks on video call, and her bosses’ callousness about it. When it all comes to a head in the film’s finale, Sotomayor delivers an indictment of the classism of Chilean society with gut-punching effect. (Stream it on Netflix.)

‘Boca Chica’

A feeling of menace hangs like fog over the joyous wedding preparations of a family in Gabriella A. Moses’s coming-of-age drama. In the sunswept, coastal Dominican town of the title, Desi (Scarlet Camilo), a 12-year-old girl, lives with her mother and aunt, and navigates a host of confusing messages about growing up as she approaches teenagehood. Her mother and the girls at school want her to dress more feminine, but when she does that, the men on the streets harass her. The church wants her to use her beautiful voice to sing hymns, while the boys in the neighborhood enlist her prowess in rap battles. For her part, she dreams of joining her brother, an accordion player working in New York, so they can continue the legacy of their uncle, a famous musician— but she can also sense that her brother’s life is not all that he makes it out to be. When Desi’s rich cousin announces his flashy plans for a wedding (to a Texan gringa, no less), the family gets together to put it all together — confronting, in the process, skeletons in their closet and the intergenerational scars of misogyny. By making the wide-eyed Desi our guide in this world, Moses allows the film a vibrant palette, colored by a child’s dreams, even as the sordid realities surrounding her become undeniably evident. (Stream it on Tubi.)

‘The Falling Sky’

Eryk Rocha and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha’s fuming, roiling documentary might be described as a “portrait” of the Indigenous Yanomami people of Brazil, though portraiture implies a flatness and wholeness that “The Falling Sky” intentionally counters. In the jungles of the Amazon, as the Yanomami people make preparations for a ritual where they commune with ancestral spirits, Rocha and Carneiro da Cunha’s camera is, for the most part, up-close and kinetic. We see hands peeling bananas, feet making their way through the forest floors, faces silhouetted by campfires, heads bumping into each other in ceremonial dances. There’s none of the distant observation and exposition typical of ethnography here; instead we receive snippets and glimpses from within, and a magisterial voice-over by the leader of the Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa (an author of a book that inspired the film).

Kopenawa details the ongoing fight of the group against the violent incursions of “merchandise people,” as he describes the colonizers. For more than a century, the Yanomami have been plagued by such invaders: first missionaries, then loggers and now gold miners, who destroy their habitat and bring disease and destruction to the people. The filmmakers are not exempt from this history. At a striking juncture in the film, an elder man looks into the camera and acknowledges that he’s letting the directors film him despite his suffering at the hands of their people. “‘Quit bothering us!’ I hope you’ll tell the whites that,” he says. His plea is not just for the sake of the tribe’s survival, but that of the whole planet. As Kopenawa says prophetically, “when the stormy winds come,” no amount of money will save us. (Stream it on Ovid. Rent it on Amazon Prime Video.)