Global Greatness

In 2020, the South Korean film “Parasite” swept the Academy Awards, winning four Oscars including Best Picture, marking the first time a non-English language movie took the industry’s top prize. But every year, smaller foreign films — often praised just as highly by critics — can get overlooked. We’d like to bring to your attention five recent selections, all of which are currently available on streaming platforms that are worth your screen time. 

Drive My Car

2021, HBO Max

This Japanese film explores themes of grief and intimacy through the tale of widowed theater director Yusuke suffering from the gradual onset of glaucoma who must rely on Misaki, a young woman working as his driver while he stages a production of “Uncle Vanya” in the city of Hiroshima. It delves into the complexities of Yusuke’s marriage to his deceased wife, Oto — particularly around sex and infidelity — and follows Yusuke on a thorny emotional journey to make peace with both the known and the unknown of their shared past as well as his future. Misaki, it is revealed, is also escaping her own family trauma. Together, the two form an unlikely, but meaningful bond.

The film is based on a short story by celebrated Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who has reportedly resisted having his work adapted into other mediums. And while The New York Times notes that past attempts to convey Murakami’s stories on film have yielded mixed results, the Times lauds “Drive My Car” — which made its world debut at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival — as an undeniable success. Overwhelmingly, others seem to agree with The Atlantic praising it as an “electrifying adaptation” that leaves the audience “hanging on every character’s next word.”

Flee

2021, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Hulu

This Danish film won praise, not just for its storytelling, but the ingenuity of its presentation. A documentary presented in animated form, it tells the story of filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s friend Amin (a pseudonym), who came to Denmark as a child after escaping from Afghanistan. Told through interviews with Rasmussen, the movie follows Amin’s journey both as an Afghan refugee and a queer man learning to reconcile his heritage and his culture with his sexuality. “Flee” made an impressive debut at the Sundance Film Festival, winning the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

From there, Rasmussen received the high-profile support needed to catch Hollywood’s attention thanks to actors Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (“Game of Thrones”), who signed on as executive producers and voiced both main characters, Rasmussen and Amin, for “Flee’s” English translation. Coster-Waldau, who is also Danish, told Indiewire: “I was blown away when I saw the movie. Documentaries by nature require you to be there and capture things at the moment on film to reflect the moment that they happen. Here, the animation is the opposite of that. It just opened me up to this story being told for the first time.”

Hand Of God

2021, Netflix

Director Paolo Sorrentino sets this autobiographical film in his native city of Naples, Italy. We meet the main character Fabietto as a teenager who has just suffered a family tragedy, struggling to cope with grief and find closure while exploring a budding interest in filmmaking. Sorrentino hasn’t specified exactly which parts of Fabietto’s story are based on his experiences but told Another Magazine that “pretty much the entire movie” is based on events that occurred in his own life.

How then, did he go about casting the younger version of himself, played in the movie by actor Filippo Scotti, who received the Best Young Actor Award at the Venice Film Festival for his portrayal? “We tried to look for a good actor,” Sorrentino explained. “And Filippo is a good actor. He looked pretty shy, exactly like I was when I was 17, and he had that precise kind of charisma. But most importantly, he’s a good actor.” Already sensing a movie star in the making, Sorrentino says he also advised his young prodigy: “Be careful, because the time will come where you’re going to be successful. Try not to let it get to your head.”

The Worst Person In The World

2021, Amazon Prime, AppleTV, YouTube

This Norwegian movie won its leading lady Renate Reinsve a Best Actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of Julie, a young woman on a journey for love and fulfillment. The so-called “worst” things she does don’t involve dramatic criminal acts, simply her inability to commit herself fully to romantic relationships, even one that appears conventionally stable and another she then seeks out specifically for its thrill and excitement.

The film is the third in what has been dubbed an “unofficial” trilogy by director Joachim Trier. And while not all three follow the same characters, they do take place in Oslo and feature young adults attempting to sort out their emotional identities.

While it might sound like a small, niche story, “The Worst Person in the World” was noticed on a global scale, scoring Oscar nominations for International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay for its co-writers, Trier and Eskil Vogt.

Overall, critics were mixed on the film itself, but seemed to agree the standout reason to see it is Reinsve for her captivating performance. The film and television publication Collider says she is “an absolute joy to watch on this adventure through her own life. Every new chapter in her life and in this film offers Reinsve a new way to explore Julie, whether it’s in showing the differences between two potential loves, or the excitement of discovering something new about herself. This is a film that asks Reinsve to present the most vulnerable, meaningful, heartbreaking, and powerful moments of a person’s life, and no matter what the challenge that arises from Trier and Vogt’s Oscar-nominated screenplay, Reinsve is up for it.”

Prayers For The Stolen

2021, Netflix

This Mexican drama is an adaptation of a novel by the same name and centers around a group of girls experiencing adolescence while surrounded by the ever-present threat of ruthless cartels who overrun their town, always on the hunt to kidnap young women. Their physical appearances, which pose a growing fascination among them, is of grave concern to their mothers, who chop their hair off (using lice as an excuse) in an attempt to make them less enticing to the criminals looking to steal them. In the world of this poor farming community, even the sudden disappearance of an entire family is a brutal reality these villagers live with. Holes are dug by the girls to hide in at the first signal of danger. Yet the film is not entirely bleak, showing us glimmers of humor and hope as the years pass, the three central characters maturing from children to teenagers. Normal coming-of-age rites of passages — like awkward first crushes and developing bodies — are still part of their lives, despite the atmosphere of terror that pervades their everyday safety.

Although a fictionalized story, the movie “shines a much-needed light on the consequences of Mexico’s war on drugs, specifically highlighting the plight of the nation’s women and girls,” wrote The Guardian. And documentary director Tatiana Huezo, in her first fictional scripted feature “is a forceful look into a part of Mexico that’s perhaps best understood through young girls’ eyes, where the greatest threats are lurking within the questions their parents refuse to answer.”