The World on Film

Professor David Coury weighs in on the best international films of the year.

For this year’s Academy Awards, three of the five individuals nominated for Best Director were non-English language filmmakers. The winner, Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, was recognized for Roma, the most nominated film of the year that premiered not in movie cinemas around the country but on Netflix. Roma was also the first film ever to be nominated for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, suggesting that the Academy is finally coming around to recognizing the breadth, quality, and diversity of the some 2500 films made annually around the world. With on-line streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, or the new Criterion channel, it is easier than ever to access films from around the world.

Besides Cuarón’s Roma, two of the best international films this year (I prefer “international” to “foreign” as you’ll find these films reflect emotions and a shared human experience that aren’t that foreign at all) were Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War from Poland and Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum from Lebanon. Like Roma, Pawlikowski’s Cold War is a historic and nostalgic look back at the tensions between East and West Europe as embodied and negotiated in the film’s two musician protagonists who fall in and out of love over the course of the Cold War. A love story and a history lesson all in one, film critic Tomris Laffly writes that the film’s aching passions and yearning “makes you thankful to be alive with human feelings, heartbreaks of the past be damned.”

Heartbreak is exactly how New York Times critic A.O. Scott describes Labaki’s powerful film about the Syrian war and refugees it has produced and which challenges both the East and the West (now no longer just the European East and West). Capernaum tells the story of a young boy, Zain, who sues his parents for bringing him into the world—a world filled with poverty, struggle and pain. No child, he argues, should be forced to endure the sadness and misery that he has been subjected to in his short life and as such, the film serves as a powerful commentary on the 65 million people who have been forcibly displaced around the world today.

What makes these films so special and worth seeking out? Roma and Cold War, for instance, were both filmed in beautiful black and white (and the cinematographers were rightly nominated for Oscars for their work) and both films remind us that, at its essence, cinema is an art form with roots in photography and the visual arts. In Capernaum, Labaki sought to portray a kind of social realism by choosing not only to use lay actors but ones plucked from refugee camps and even prison to tell her story, something almost unthinkable in Hollywood, where star power and name recognition can make or break a film. Scott calls her film a “sprawling tale wrenched from real life [that] goes beyond the conventions of documentary or realism into a mode of representation that doesn’t quite have a name.” Similarly, Roma deals with class struggles and ethnic inequalities in the Mexico City of Cuarón’s childhood. The film’s protagonist Cleo is played by an indigenous woman, Yalitza Aparicio, who had no previous acting experience but nevertheless became the first indigenous (and only fourth Latina) to be nominated for an Oscar for best actress.

To be sure, world cinema also produces its share of popular cinema not unlike the action films and superhero movies of Hollywood. Some of the best films from around the world, though, offer insights into the lives of others in distant cultures and also challenge us to reflect on our shared humanity. While they may not be as fun-filled as the latest installment of Star Wars or the next Marvel action film, they are nevertheless well worth your time and effort to seek out.

By Professor David Coury

David Coury is Frankenthal Professor of the Humanities (German) and Global Studies and a co-advisor of the minor in Film and Media Studies. Additionally he is director of the Green Bay Film Society, whose International Film Series (now in its 19th year) screens international and independent films twice a month at the Neville Public Museum. Admission is free and all films are open to the public.