CINEMA ONE Originals brings multitude of new takes on storytelling through its exciting World Cinema section lineup for its 15th year, featuring the films The Lighthouse, The Father, The Invisible Life of Eurice Gusmao, Knives Out, Matthias and Maxime, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Truth, and The Two Popes.

Opening the festival on November 7 is the much-awaited sophomore film from The Witch (2015) director Robert Eggers, The Lighthouse, which stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as lighthouse keepers slowly going insane on a black rock. David Sims of The Atlantic commended the film for capturing its audience in its strangeness. He wrote, “It’s a bracing squall of a movie, a briny delight that’s as amusing as it is mesmerizingly strange.”

Thematically kindred in many ways, Fernando Meirelles’ The Two Popes while about the often tenuous relationship between Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, is also about two men negotiating their estrangements. The Netflix film stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce.

Alienation shadows two other films in the lineup, this time, between parent and offspring, with Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s tragicomic road movie The Father centers on a father who takes a trip with his son after their neighbor claims his dead wife has been making phone calls from beyond the grave; and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s follow-up to his Palme D’Or-winning Shoplifters, and first feature outside his native Japan, The Truth. The film stars Catherine Deneuve as a French movie star whose tumultuous relationship with her daughter gets even more fractious when her revealing memoir goes into publication.

Xavier Dolan’s present day Matthias And Maxine is about two friends who try to reconcile dormant and kindled feelings during a summer abroad; while Celine Sciamma’s period drama Portrait Of A Lady on Fire is about a young painter who falls in love with her subject, may be generations apart in their settings, but both are incisive and poignant evocations of desire. The film won both the Best Screenplay award as well as the Queer Palm at the 2019 Cannes International Film Festival)

Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s describes his sprawling and expansive The Invisible Life of Eurice Gusmao. Based on Martha Batalha’s 2016 novel, is a tropical melodrama with all the emotional upheavals the descriptor suggests. The film won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2019 Cannes

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out is an Agatha Christie riff that lovingly reconstructs it while cleverly deconstructing it and being fiendishly entertaining in the process. The film stars Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

The 15th Cinema One Originals opens on Nov. 7 (Thursday), 7 p.m. at the Ayala Malls Manila Bay Cinema 7. The festival runs from November 7 to 17 at Trinoma, Glorietta, Ayala Malls Manila Bay, Gateway, and Powerplant Makati. There will also be screenings at Vista Cinemas in Iloilo and Evia Lifestyle and in Cinema Centenario, Cinema ‘76, Black Maria, UP Cine Adarna, and FDCP Cinematheque Manila. For more information, visit @CinemaOneOriginals on Facebook.

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