Must-see foreign documentaries

Ever since Sundance essentially divided in two — giving an emphasis to world cinema as well as to American independent film — filmgoers have been discovering the joy and the excitement of films from not only European, Asian and South American capitals, but also from such far-flung places as Iran, Ghana and Tibet.

For foreign fare, the upcoming festival at Park City looks as promising as ever with 12 documentary films having been selected from a total of 782 international documentary submissions. Additionally, 14 narrative films selected from an amazing total of 1,022 submissions from far-away lands.

Among this year's promising collection of new documentaries, Russia, Georgia and Norway have teamed together to produce an eye- opening documentary called "Russian Lessons," which examines Russia's motives and actions in 2008 when news of "ethnic cleansing" in the region of Georgia was reported.

In another stirring documentary, called "Enemies of the People" and coming from the combined efforts of England and Cambodia, shocking revelations are unearthed when a young journalist whose family had been killed by the Khmer Rouge searches out and befriends the perpetrators of the notorious Killing Fields genocide.

Still another film from the United Kingdom, called "Waste Land," documents the plight of the "garbage pickers" in the world's largest landfill found in Rio de Janeiro.

And coming from Brazil itself is "Secrets of the Tribe," which questions academic anthropologist's representation of the indigenous Indians in the Amazon Basin.

"Sins of My Father," also from South America, is a documentary from Argentina and Colombia, dealing firsthand with a man's attempt to flee his past and move beyond the questionable legacy of his father, the notorious Colombian warlord Pablo Escobar.

Making its world premiere is "A Film Unfinished," a German/Israeli effort, which focuses on an actual film discovered in Nazi archives, revealing the mechanisms used to stage Warsaw Ghetto life.

"Kick in Iran" concerns the problems of the first female professional Taekwondo fighter in a country where women are expected to play only a subordinate role.

And in "The Last Train Home," problems abound in China when a migrant-worker family tries, along with 200 million other peasants, to reunite with their distant family.