Through the Looking Glass: Top 100 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2020 – Picks #5 to #1

New projects directed by auteurs from France, Italy, China and the UK take slots 5 to 1 in our most anticipated foreign films of 2020.

#5. Annette – Leos Carax

Running into delays thanks to lead actor Adam Driver’s commitment to Star Wars, 2020 looks to be the year we’ll finally have a new film from Leos Carax with the musical Annette, who hasn’t been on hand since 2012’s Holy Motors (which was also Carax’s first feature following 1999’s Pola X). Sporting a soundtrack developed with Sparks and a cast which will also feature Michelle Williams, the Amazon Studios production will be Carax’s first musical and English language film. As of mid-2018, production was planned to begin on Annette in summer 2019.

#4. Monica – Andrea Pallaoro

Italy’s Andrea Pallaoro and his co-writer Orlando Tirado will head to the US for his third feature Monica, concerning an estranged transgender woman who returns home to visit her dying mother. It’s slated to be the second in Pallaoro’s thematically related trilogy on women, following his exquisite 2017 drama Hannah, which won Charlotte Rampling the Best Actress Award in Venice.

#3. Night Voltage – Peter Strickland

While 2018 saw the latest offering from visionary genre enthusiast Peter Strickland with In Fabric (four years after his deliciously subversive art-house sexploitation homage The Duke of Burgundy), the director seems to be moving forward with Night Voltage, which was originally mentioned several years back. Set in the 1980s New York disco scene, a young Greek-American named Nondas does what he has to do to jumpstart his own electronic music career. Produced through Tristan Goligher of The Bureau, along with David Hinojosa and Christine Vachon, the project is listed as shooting in 2019.

#2. Shulan River – Hou Hsiao-hsien

Already five years after his masterful 2015 title The Assassin (which won him Best Director at Cannes), Hou Hsiao-hsien might have his latest, Shulan River (a loose adaptation of the novel by Hsieh Hai-meng) ready by 2020. Taking place in modern-day Taipei, Hsiao-hsien focuses on a lonely river goddess whose waterways have now been covered by modern roadways.

#1. Untitled Jonathan Glazer Holocaust Project – Jonathan Glazer

And then 2020 we might finally see the fourth title from the exceptionally enigmatic UK auteur Jonathan Glazer, who since breaking out in 2000 with Sexy Beast has only made four films over the span of two decades. Following 2004’s Birth and 2013’s Under the Skin, Glazer revisits WWII Auschwitz in his latest as-yet-titled film, which focuses on the German bystanders whose complicity assisted in allowing the Holocaust to transpire. In mid-2018, Glazer had confirmed he was eyeing a summer 2019 production with delivery in 2020.