Oscar 2001: Best Foreign-Language Film Submissions

After many years of having worked as a tour guide at the Senegalese slave museum, Alloune decides to go to America in search of his ancestors. They were taken away from his village 200 years ago and sold as slaves in the New World.

Shows how several characters spend Christmas Eve in Buenos Aires, and how their lives intersect.

For Ari, nothing feels like anything. He doesn't do relationships, doesn't do attachments. There's only sex. That is until he meets Tiina. Together with Tiina and her closest circle of friends, this could be their last summer of freedom.

Jean is a family man and factory worker who dreams of becoming a songwriter. Pinning his hopes on his teenage daughter, Marva, he takes her to singing contests in which the awkward and overweight girl struggles to belt out a tune. When Jean is suddenly fired because of cut backs, he is ashamed and even more desperate to have his daughter succeed. In a chance meeting Jean kidnaps the most famous pop star in the country and holds her hostage demanding to be heard by the music industry. Catching the attention of the media and the eyes of the nation, Jean and Marva realize that the show must go on until everyone is famous.

A true story that comically depicts the relationship between an ordinary woman and her three husbands, who live in the same house in a poor and arid small village of the Brazilian northeast.

Ivan's best friend, Kamen, is in an American hospital, in coma after an accident. Since he's denied a visa to the USA and can't stay by his side in his last moments, Ivan decides to set off for Bulgaria countryside, taking the camera Kamen has given him. There's a legend in Kamen's place of birth - a small mountain village - that one song could bring people back to life. Ivan starts a journey to find it and record it, collecting a myriad of stories along the way. Will he succeed?

After plunging her car into a river, a woman encounters a man who helps her come to terms with her life.

A lonely man becomes increasingly obsessed with the beautiful teenager he used to help care for his grandmother.

Gong Li stars in this low-key drama about a single mother who will do anything to provide for her son. Sun Liying (Li) struggles to care for her hearing-impaired child Zheng Da (Gao Xin) after her taxi driver husband divorces.

Stipan is a policeman who comes to small Adriatic island off the Croatian coast in order to investigate reported strange phenomena that had frightened the whole population. At first, nobody wants to co-operate with him, but he finally finds that the island is being allegedly haunted by the ghost of Josip Broz Tito, Communist leader of former Yugoslavia. For Luka, the mayor, this is the opportunity to turn entire island into Tito-themed amusement park. Tito's WW2 veterans, on the other hand, don't believe in ghosts; for them, the apparition is actually Tito himself, who had returned in order to lead them into a new revolution which would restore Communism.

In German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Czechia), a childless couple agree to hide a Jewish friend at great personal risk of discovery and execution.

A mother and her autistic son Brian. One evening he comes home from his evening walk with stained shoes. The next morning it is rumored that a young woman was murdered in the neighboring park. The identity of the suspect is obvious, and while the police break down the door, Fru tries to keep her son in safe waters.

A bus called Sueños (Dreams) links three modern-day tales set in exotic Ecuador - the equator-straddling country that calls itself "The Middle of the World." Each of these stories carries a woman's name, and each features a mysterious, alluring female outsider who bewitches men. In the first tale, a blonde woman with an unclear past arrives in a remote, male-deprived Andean town and offers piano lessons, only to become the focus of wild rumors and innuendo. In the second, a married college professor who is haunted by nightmares becomes obsessed with a beguiling woman who seems to be sending him an ominous message. In the final story, a couple vacationing at a jungle resort refuse to believe in the ancient myths of Ecuador, but are forced to confront the legendary Guasangó.

Seven Songs of the Tundra takes place amidst the infinite white tundra, where a small religious cult sacrifices a reindeer. A ceremonial song accompanies the sacrifice, triggering a narrative divided into seven chapters, which re-enacts a pivotal point in the Nenets natives' history. Deprived of their independence and prosperity, the nomadic reindeer breeders were ostracized from their homeland and asked to abandon not only their language and traditions but also their children that were forced to enroll in boarding schools.

The lives of 6 people over 35 in Rouen, France, and their relationship to each other.

The summer adventures of teenaged Sybilla, who falls in love with a middle-aged father while being romanced by his teenaged son.

Flanders, a famous female author, travels 1989 after the fall of the Berlin wall into the German capital. She is deeply depressed of the events because she saw the communistic states as a very good thing that has now ended. In the joy of these days she finds no person to understand her, so she has to travel back to Munich. After meeting several people, known and unknown, it seems as if there will be no way to go.

With the sweet taste of love's first kiss in his mouth, an engineer takes a trip down memory lane after receiving an invitation from an old friend. Thirty years after that innocent peck on the lips, fate reunites two estranged soulmates.

Two neighbors form a strong bond after both suspect extramarital activities of their spouses. However, they agree to keep their bond platonic so as not to commit similar wrongs.

Three generations of Hungarian Jews with a furniture shop in Budapest: at the center is the love affair of Imre and Gerda. Imre is the elder son of the family patriarch, a veteran of the Great War. Imre greets Gerda when she arrives from Germany to teach; he shepherds her through a sham marriage and divorce so that she, an Aryan, can marry him. He becomes a Christian and has their son Kisfiu, the story's narrator, baptized. We follow family fortune from brief Bolshevik rule in 1919 through the rise of the Nazis, Imre's life in a camp, hiding during World War II, the fate of Gerda and Imre's brothers, the ascendancy of the Communists, revolt, and Kisfiu's growing up.

Páll is an artistic and sensitive young man. Getting dumped by his girlfriend, Dagny, triggers his descent into madness. We follow him on his way to what seems like inevitable doom; at home with his parents who finally can't cope, and in the mental institution, Kleppur.

Saketh Ram's wife is raped and killed during direct action day riots in Calcutta. He is convinced that Mahatma Gandhi is responsible for all the problems happening in the country and sets out to kill him.

Young Iranian Kurdish siblings try to save the youngest of them, who is seriously ill.

Is today's fanaticism tomorrow's policy? In a West Bank settlement, Rabbi Meltzer has a grand design: he's building a movement "to pray at the Temple Mount." His yeshiva has scholars, and the settlement is getting its own military company to be commanded by Menachem, a disciple of the rabbi. He also wants his daughter, Michal, to marry Pini, the yeshiva's best scholar. Michal has no interest in Pini, but she is attracted to Menachem. When she rebuffs Pini, he hatches a bold and secret plan. Is jealousy the motivation or something else? Meanwhile, the army and Mossad are closely watching the rabbi's activities and Menachem's military training. Who is trustworthy?

"I cento passi" (one hundred steps) was the distance between the Impastatos' house and the house of Tano Badalamenti, an important Mafia boss, in the small Sicilian town of Cinisi. The movie is the story of Peppino Impastato, a young left-wing activist who in the late seventies (when almost nobody dared to speak about the Mafia, and several politicians maintained that the Mafia did not even exist) repeatedly denounced Badalamenti's criminal activities and the whole Mafia system, by using a small local radio station to broadcast his political pronouncements in the form of ironic humour. In 1978 Peppino (30 years old) was killed by an explosion. The police archived the case as an accident or a suicide, but his friends never accepted this conclusion. Note: This is a true story. More than twenty years after Peppino's death, the case has been re-opened. Tano Badalamenti, meanwhile, has been convicted in the USA for drug trafficking.