“Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” said South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho when receiving his “Best International Feature Film” Oscar for Parasite (2019).
The world of film is vast, but its medium-defining foundation is its lack of banality, a foundation rooted in cinema’s international scope. Film offers an abundance of stories and an infinite number of ways to tell each story, giving viewers and creators new interpretations of how cinema can take shape.
Foreign movies, like all movies, live to entertain — that is the goal after all — but the role that international cinema plays goes beyond just a two-hour excursion to the theater (or what is often a two-hour watch on Netflix). Movies characterize national philosophies, ideologies and culture through storytelling that can both encapsulate and challenge standard thought. An increase in engagement with foreign cinema is an increase in engagement with foreign culture.
The Academy Awards (the Oscars) announced the award nominations in January of 2025 for the Oscars’ 97th show. The “Best Motion Picture” Oscar is widely considered to be the most esteemed award in the film world, and of the 10 movies nominated in 2025, two of them were foreign.
While the Oscars don’t entirely reflect box office success — and they certainly don’t determine which films are actually better than others — the Oscars do serve as a barometer for industry trends, and the industry is progressively broadening the scope of films receiving American praise.
In 2020, Parasite became the first non-English film to win Best Motion Picture at the Oscars, and it is the fourth most watched film on Letterboxd, a movie-logging app. Parasite paved the way for a rapid increase in American recognition of global films, but it did so surprisingly — its warranted, yet unprecedented international success was a product of the Academy’s willingness to expand its formerly narrow perspective.
The Academy was looking to demonstrate its commitment to representing a larger variety of stories, the next step being to showcase its appreciation of foreign works. For a movie as strikingly violent as Parasite, its award show success came as a shock. A film like Parasite, even if in English, didn’t follow the traditional award-bait style; however, the Oscars were beginning to open their eyes to foreign films, and Parasite became the beneficiary, deservedly so, of the Academy’s new infatuation.
Since 2020, according to “tvtech,” non-English film and television has seen a 24% increase in viewership in English speaking countries.
The die-hard movie watching and dissecting community isn’t new to the world of foreign films. Of the 250 highest-rated Letterboxd films, on average (the list changes as ratings change), 30-40% of the films are produced outside of the United States.
“[Foreign films] don’t follow the typical Hollywood structure, and since they have smaller budgets, they can focus on telling unique stories instead of focusing on being crowd-pleasing and making money,” said third-year Minnehaha student Patrick Linder.
The prominence of foreign films, even if not always directly observed, is naturally ingrained into cinema culture. Today’s filmmakers often credit foreign directors, such as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Federico Fellini, with the evolution of cinema, both technically and in expression of story.
Even Star Wars, now known as a seminal franchise in the science-fiction genre, and a franchise that defined a generation of movie watchers, was inspired by The Hidden Fortress (1958), a Kurosawa feature.
Engaging with foreign films isn’t solely a matter of gaining an understanding of foreign culture or movie history; it can simply be a matter of choosing entertainment that has a unique style. Storytelling can mold to fit the natural tone of a culture, giving many countries a distinct flavor that viewers enjoy. For example, relative to American films, Korean movies can be more melodramatic and Italian movies tend to be dialogue-heavy and subtle in storytelling.
Foreign films are a multi-faceted medium that give viewers the opportunity to engage with different cultures, and, most importantly, provide viewers with a world of entertainment that is worth exploring.