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If you are looking to stir emotions and grab some tissues this weekend Our Friend has got you covered.

Based on Matthew Teague’s book The Friend: Love Is Not a Big Enough Word, Gabriela Cowperthwaite directs this heartfelt drama adapted by Brad Ingelsby that follows journalist Matt (Casey Affleck), his wife Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and their two young daughters as their lives are turned upside down when Nicole is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Matt becomes overwhelmed with being a caretaker and a parent so he calls on the couple’s best friend Dane Faucheux (Jason Segel) to help out. As Dane puts his life on hold to stay with his friends, the impact of this life decision changes all of their lives in the most profound way.

Our Friend is based on the true story of the Teague family and went by the title The Friend when it made...

A week after Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela) announces his immigration dreams to his mother Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) — a simple plan, consisting of alighting to Arizona with his best friend Rigo (Armando García), getting a job, and not much else — the young Mexican teenager is gone. Months later, the boys have yet to announce their arrival in the United States, nor have they returned to the landlocked state of Guanajuato. They, like so many before and likely after them, have simply gone missing, and in a country where such a tragedy is all too common, it falls on the people they’ve left behind to figure out what has happened to their beloved boys.

Fernanda Valadez’s feature directorial debut “Identifying Features” takes that seemingly tear-jerking concept — one beset by knotty bureaucratic issues, painful language barriers, and the sense of further danger around every bend — and turns it into an artfully...

The original Spanish-language title of Identifying Features is Sin Señas Particulares, or “No Particular Signs”—a reference to the individuating marks found, or not, on unclaimed corpses found near the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s an echo of Sin Nombre (“Nameless”), Cary Joji Fukunaga’s vivid immigration-thriller debut from 2009, and an apt title for a film that takes a fresh look at lives erased and distorted by migration and violence. Though Trump-era border policy is an implicit backdrop to the cartel activity and mass abductions she depicts, debuting director Fernanda Valadez’s zoomed-in perspective is on family trauma, not imperial culpability.

The Sundance audience and screenwriting award-winner Identifying Features begins in Guanajuato, in central Mexico, with the lyrical sight of a boy, Jesus, walking through a field to tell mother Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) of his intention to cross the border. Jesus walks off through the windblown grass with another...

The winner of the Audience Award and Best Screenplay in the World Cinema (Dramatic) section at Sundance Film Festival this year, Kino Lorber has now unveiled the first engrossing trailer for the immigration drama Identifying Features. The directorial debut for Fernanda Valadez, heralding a new talent in the international cinema scene, will play at New Directors/New Films starting December 9 and opens on January 22.

Identifying Features follows the harrowing experience of two individuals, Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández)––a mother struggling to find her son after he was deported trying to enter the United States to find work––and Miguel (David Illescas), another deportee whose path converges.

See the trailer below.

Identifying Features plays at New Directors/New Films starting December 9 and opens on January 22.

The post Identifying Features Trailer: Sundance Winner Follows a Mother's Harrowing Journey in Mexico first appeared on The Film Stage.

"Don't ask those questions in public. You don't know who's listening." Kino Lorber has unveiled an official US trailer for an indie mother drama from Mexico titled Identifying Features, also known as Sin Señas Particulares (No Particular Signs) in Spanish. And the German title is Was Geschah mit Bus 670?, which just translates to What Happened to Bus 670?. The film follows Mercedes Hernandez as a mother who travels across Mexico in search for her son who authorities say died while trying to cross the border into the United States. "From this simple but urgent premise, director Fernanda Valadez has crafted a lyrical, suspenseful slow burn, equally constructed of moments of beauty and horror, and which leads to a startling, shattering conclusion. Winner of the World Cinema Dramatic Audience and Screenplay Awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival." This also stars David Illescas, Juan Jesús Varela, Ana Laura Rodríguez, Laura Elena Ibarra,...

With the first Sundance Film Festival of the new decade wrapping up today, the award winners have been announced. Leading the pack is Minari, which picked up U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic, and Boys State, which was awarded U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. It was also announced that Tabitha Jackson will be the new director of the festival, following John Cooper’s departure.

Check out the full winner list below, along with links to our reviews where available, and return for our wrap-up. See our complete coverage here.

2020 Sundance Film Festival Feature Film Awards

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary was presented to: Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, for Boys State / U.S.A. — In an unusual experiment, a thousand 17-year-old boys from Texas join together to build a representative government from the ground up.

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to: Lee Isaac Chung,...

While U.S. attention in recent years has focused on the supposed hordes of “invading” illegal immigrants seeking to cross the southern border, “Identifying Features” is about a separate but related concern: The alarming if unknowable number of those immigrants who go missing, often robbed, kidnapped and/or killed, before they ever reach our soil.

Most of the film’s primary characters are mothers trying to find out what happened to their vanished would-be-émigré offspring, providing Fernanda Valadez’s feature with a compelling subject and some powerful scenes. But the narrative is also frustratingly cryptic, holding back basic intel that might clarify things (or even this story) for viewers unfamiliar with the issues. A film that straddles the line between artful and arty like this one isn’t designed for a wide public. “Features” is ultimately worth the sit, but it needn’t have required quite so much effort.

Magdalena...