#foreign cinema

And God Created Woman

Buster Keaton in Joinville, France, 1934 during the filming of Le roi des Champs-Élysées. Published in the magazine Het Leven with an article about Keaton's admission to a mental institution in California

inspired by @drinkfantasy

How do you find them?

There are many ways to discover international cinema.

Browse the categories of free or premium streaming services. Whether it's Hulu/Netflix/Max or Tubi/Kanopy you will find categories like "Bollywood" "International" "API Voices" or you can sort by language/country

Browse lists, keywords or databases on letterboxd, IMDb, Wikipedia or anywhere else you can get information about films.

Ask friends, acquaintances, mutuals etc for recommendations

You can look at the list of international Oscar winning films or other film prizes and festivals (like Cannnes, Berlinale, Venice, tiff etc)

If your town has an indie cinema and/or a university there's a high chance that international films will be screened throughout the year

If this is all a little overwhelming, I'm curating several lists on letterboxd. shameless self advertisement:

Fun/Serious are entirely based on films that I have personally watched and vouch for, while Horror/Queer contain films that are still on my watchlist or that were recommended by others.

Where do you watch them?

Premium Services

Netflix

Hulu

HBO Max

Amazon Prime

Probably all the others too

Free Services

Kanopy (this is my absolute favorite, requires a library card)

Tubi

Pluto

Roku TV

Viki Rakuten (some free some premium options)

IQIYI (some free some premium options)

Arte (if you're in Europe or have a VPN)

RTVE (if you're in Spain or have a VPN)

YouTube Free with Ads

biblio+ (requires a library card)

"Free" Services

YouTube

Dailymotion

Vimeo

Ok (dot) ru

BiliBili (May require a VPN)

effed up movies (for horror films)

several other websites that show up when you google things like "film name watch for free online" as long as you're careful

How do you approach them?

There is no right or wrong way to do this. You can watch subtitled or dubbed films. You can try to google the most famous film, actor or director from a country and try to watch that first. You can try to find some mainstream romcom or any other genre you might already enjoy. You can get obsessed with a random actor or director and just go through their entire work. You can start by checking out countries you're already interested in or know something about or you pick a random one. You could even do it alphabetically if that's more fun for you. You can do one film per country or do a deep dive into one country before moving on.

I would include animation if people want that, as well.

But it would be kind of a huge article to write, so I want to know if there's any interest first. I think I did something similar ages ago, but it wasn't comprehensive. I would like to do something more structured, and focus on making it accessible to a modern western audience, include stuff like content warnings and cultural nuances and such?

I also want to focus on the fun movies more, instead of the artsy stuff. Mainly because that's what I grew up with, but also because I feel like western ideas of Russian (or """foreign""") cinema is always like. Black-and-white arthouse stuff about death and alcoholism. Which is fine if you're into that! But it's not always the most accessible.

viy (1967) directed by kostantin ershov & georgiy kropachyov