Foreign feature films offer rich Sundance Film Festival experience

The 14 foreign feature films selected to screen at Sundance 2010 — out of more than 1,000 entries submitted from countries outside the United States — offer a rich and exciting showcase to this year's viewers. All will have subtitles.

Near the top of my own not-to-be-missed list is "Son of Babylon," a new film from Iraq.

Taking place in the days following Saddam Hussein's fall from grace, it follows a young Kurdish boy and his grandmother who make their way through the Iraq's vast landscape in hopes of finding the old woman's son (the boy's father). The film will make its international premiere at Sundance.

And with Tallinn, Estonia, now holding the spot in my heart that Czechoslovakia's Prague used to own, I'm looking forward to "The Temptation of St. Tony" by Estonia's director/screenwriter Veiko Ounpuu. In this new film, a mid-level manager, who reaches middle age and toys with morality, begins to lose his hold on what had been — up to now — a relatively satisfying and quiet existence.

Change is also in store for an upper-class family in Bolivia in the new film, "Zona Sur" (or "Southern District"). Set in a beautiful villa and gardens in La Paz, the film centers on a wealthy family that senses that social changes are now beginning to signal the end of their elegant upper-class lifestyle.From India comes a world-premiere of the film "Peepli Live," which takes a satirical look at the predicament of a poor farmer who, overcome by debt, announces to his family that he will commit suicide so his family might receive compensation from the government.

"Grown-Up Movie Star," from Canada, concerns a teenage girl who, just when she has determined to grow up fast, finds that her mother has run away, leaving her to care for her hopelessly rural father.

Australia's "Animal Kingdom" makes its world premiere at Sundance, as it also deals with a teenager (this time a boy who has lost his mother) finding himself suddenly caught in the turmoil of a criminal family, but who soon is befriended by a detective who is determined to try to save him. The film features two top actors from Australia — Guy Pearce and Ben Mendelsohn.

From Argentina is "The Man Next Door" (El Hombre de al Lado) in which a small incident sparks a feud between neighbors which, in turn, triggers out-of-control paranoid obsessions.

"Contracorriente" (co-produced by Colombia, Peru, France, and Germany, and set in a Peruvian seaside) offers the predicament of a fisherman who, although married, has a male lover, and this does not sit well within the strictures of his town's traditions.