Three foreign films share heartbreak from different perspectives

A family dealing with the aftershock of being notified that their son has been killed while on active duty. A transgender woman disrespected by the family of her fallen lover. A community fighting a government bureaucracy that won’t distribute life-saving drugs to AIDS patients. These are just a few of the subjects this year in what is an always diverse crop of submissions for the foreign-language film Oscar. Only five will make the final cut, but they each have the power to illuminate with audiences and voters.

“BPM (Beats Per Minute)”

To say Robin Campillo’s latest film means a lot to him is something of an understatement. The out, gay filmmaker remembers attending film school in Paris in his early 20s and, like many, being traumatized by the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic then referred to as “gay cancer.” It took him decades to tell the story of the men and women who made up ACT UP Paris, an activist group he joined in the early ’90s. With thousands of people dying, the group used public demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience first implemented by ACT UP New York to demand the French government and pharmaceutical companies distribute HIV-suppressing therapies more quickly.

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It was during a break from filming his 2013 drama “Eastern Boys” that Campillo was finally compelled to revisit this part of his life.

He recalls, “We were talking about the shoot and I said to my friend [and producer] Hugues Charbonneau, ‘I want more days of shooting,’ and he said, ‘I owe you nothing.’ and I said, ‘You owe me big because I dressed up your boyfriend when he died.’ Just like a private joke, but I realized that people around us were like, ‘What’s going on?’”

The two men explained to the other members of the crew that Campillo had dressed the body of Charbonneau’s boyfriend after he died from AIDS, a heartbreaking moment that eventually was incorporated into “BPM.” At the time, the revelation prompted Campillo’s other producer, Marie-Ange Luciani, to make this important story his next priority. She told him, “You won’t have any new projects, you’ll do this film and you stop thinking of other projects.”

“And that’s why I decided to do it,” Campillo says. “The strange thing is that we were in a restaurant and the owner of the restaurant was an actor too and his boyfriend died too.”

“Foxtrot”

Almost from the first frame, Samuel Maoz’s three-act drama is something of a gut-punch. The first act finds a Tel Aviv couple (Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler) coping with the shock of being informed their oldest child (Yonaton Shiray) has been killed in the line of duty as a member of the Israeli Defense Forces. It was inspired by an experience Maoz had with his own teenage daughter many years before.

“My eldest daughter went to high school but she never made it on time. In order to not be late, she used to order a taxi. This cost us a bunch of money and one morning I asked her to take the bus,” Maoz recalls. “She’d be late, but she’d learn the hard way to get up in time. A half-hour after she left I saw on a news website that [a bomb exploded on her line] and dozens of people were killed. I called her but [no one answered].

He continues, “One hour later she returned home. She was late for the bus that exploded, but she missed it and took the next one. I experienced I can say the worst hour of my life. Worse than the Lebanon War. And I asked myself, ‘What can I learn from it?’”

The second part of “Foxtrot” is markedly different as it focuses on the son’s life with three fellow soldiers at a pointless checkpoint in the middle of nowhere. It’s decidedly surreal compared to the first and third acts and that was intentional on Maoz’s part.

“I built an emotional journey that I want the audience to experience,” he says. “I told people that the first sequence should show and shape. The second sequence should hypnotize and the third should be moving.”

That third sequence revisits the family six months later as they are still recovering from the earlier events, but there is a glimmer of hope in their own futures.

“It’s an allegory to Israeli society,” Maoz says. He then adds, “I don’t like to talk about the meanings of my films because other people do it much better than me.”

“A Fantastic Woman”

Sebastián Lelio’s latest cinematic marvel simply would not be the same movie without the transcendent performance of Daniela Vega. But, when Lelio first met the 28-year-old actress and singer he wasn’t looking to cast her as Marina, the “fantastic woman” in question.

“I was looking for information to get rid of my ignorance. I didn’t have any transgender friends and I was living in Berlin for four years, by then. So I was a bit detached about what was going on in the streets of Santiago,” the Chilean filmmaker admits. “So I was like, ‘Oh, this story could happen to a transgender woman.’ And I was like, ‘Err, stop, we need to see who is out there. We need to meet people.’”

Lelio, who is best known for 2013’s art house hit “Gloria,” was referred to Vega by a number of women in the trans community. However, he was upfront with her initially that he was just looking for someone to assist the project as a “cultural consultant.” Lelio says the day they met “was a milestone in the process.”

“I was co-writing with this woman I’m talking to, Daniela, and falling in love with her as a person,” Lelio says. “And then she made me understand that I wasn’t going to make the film without a transgender actor. That would have been an anachronism. And that it is already too late for that, you know? I mean you can’t. It’s like doing a film about black people with white people painted [black].”

Vega eventually landed the title role, but Lelio is grateful for her overall involvement because the film’s screenplay never would have worked without her contributions. “Her uniqueness pushed the script further. I was trying to make the script to be as complex as she was.”

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