Lixue (22) doesn’t ask herself if she likes Recife. She certainly doesn’t want to ask whether her new city likes her, after being sent there to live with her aunt. Aunt Lili owns an emporium of shops for Chinese import products and lives with her family and her workers on the 22nd floor of an exclusive apartment building. Much to the disapproval of the upper-class Brazilian landlords, who think the Chinese immigrants don’t belong in the tower. When Lixue disappears from the city, Ah (22) arrives on the scene: the first tourist in Recife in years. Her physical resemblance to Lixue is astonishing. Jetlag, insomnia and solitude lead Ah into Recife’s Chinatown. She finds a box of postcards, scrolled with Lixue’s observations of the substitute city inside the tower. Ah starts to follow in Lixue’s tracks. But after all, don’t Lixue and Ah share the same face, the same voice? Is Lixue a product of Ah’s imagination?

Awarded Best First Feature at the Locarno International Film Festival, German-Argentinian newcomer Nele Wolatz’s THE FUTURE PERFECT explores fractured relationships within culture, tradition and language in this whimsical romantic comedy. Xiaobin has just moved to Argentina to reunite with her family, who own a laundromat in Buenos Aires. She finds work at a nearby grocery store, but after struggling to communicate with customers, she becomes determined to learn Spanish, enrolling in group language lessons for Chinese immigrants. The independence afforded by learning Spanish is offset by the anxiety of becoming further enclosed in Chinese culture through an arranged marriage, or alternately, accepting the proposal of coworker Vijay, who hopes to marry her and take her to live with him in India. As lessons progress, these decisions are placed on hold while the possibilities posed by Argentina expand with each new tense learned, providing a guide to hypothetical futures, hopes, fantasies and fears. — Malin Kan