2020 was a breakthrough year in the Anglosphere for subtitled films; Parasite swept the season, becoming the first subtitled film to win best picture at the Oscars, as well as a slew of other awards. When collecting his Golden Globe for best motion picture for a non-English language film, Parasite director Bong Joon-Ho quipped: “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
From Japanese horror to German romance, and global stories that defy genre altogether, there is quite literally a world of subtitled cinema waiting for you. So, if the “one-inch barrier” has ever stopped you, consider these films your invitation to begin exploring, and a BFI Player subscription your passport to international films.
8½ (1963, Federico Fellini)
To watch 8½ is to dive inside the beautifully chaotic mind of Italian cinema itself. Fellini turns creative paralysis into a circus of fantasy and masculine neurosis, following director Guido Anselmi as he flails through a doomed production, pursued by lovers, critics and his own ego. Reality dissolves into reverie with childhood guilt and erotic longing swirling together in images that are both indulgent and painfully self-aware. Marcello Mastroianni became the template for the tortured auteur even as Fellini gently mocks the very myth he helped invent. It’s extravagant, navel-gazing, and utterly alive to the absurdity of genius. No surprise, then, that Hollywood crowned this act of self-examination with well deserved Oscars for best foreign language film and costume design, a rare moment where the Academy bowed to art that refused easy categorisation.
A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021, Payal Kapadia)
This is a film of whispers and screams. A Night of Knowing Nothing drifts between documentary and dream, assembling student protests, police violence and moments of fragile connection into a lament for an Indian generation under siege. Kapadia’s framing device, letters written by a young woman to a lover she can’t be with, keeps the film intimate even as it swells into political fury. The grainy black-and-white images feel haunted, as though history itself were trying to remember what power wants erased. It’s a film alive to how resistance is built from half-glimpsed moments and emotional fortitude. With this lyrical tale Kapadia quietly announced herself as one of cinema’s most exquisite poets.
Central Station (1998, Walter Salles)
Central Station begins in transactional cynicism and ends somewhere close to grace. Fernanda Montenegro’s Dora, a retired teacher making money writing letters she often never sends, is all brittle tension and survival instincts until a chance encounter with a newly orphaned boy cracks her open. Their journey across Brazil becomes a road movie of moral reawakening, attentive to class divides without slipping into sentimentality. Montenegro’s performance is a marvel of withheld emotion, which may explain why the Oscars did something rare: they noticed. Her best actress nomination, alongside one for best foreign language film, signalled international recognition for a film that understands kindness as something learned. By the end, Central Station feels less like a redemption arc than a reminder that empathy is a choice we keep making.
Chocolat (1988, Claire Denis)
Claire Denis’s Chocolat is a film about colonialism that refuses both nostalgia and neat condemnation, instead letting power dynamics seep into every look and landscape. Loosely inspired by Denis’s own childhood in Cameroon, the film follows a young French girl and her family, observed largely through Protée, the Black house servant whose quiet dignity exposes the stranglehold of occupation. Denis resists dramatic confrontation but the heat hangs heavy, racial hierarchies are rigid, desire flickers and is quickly stubbed out. This is colonialism not as spectacle but as structure – banal, intimate, and unspeakably cruel. The directorial debut announced Denis as a major new voice, already uninterested in easy empathy or clean morality. Chocolat has only grown in stature, now recognised as a foundational work in Denis’s celebrated career and one of global cinema’s most perceptive works.
Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962, Agnès Varda)
Few films capture being on the precipice of your life changing forever like Cléo from 5 to 7. Over two hours in Paris, Cléo drifts through mirrors, cafes and streets as she awaits medical results that could prove fatal. At first she’s consumed by her own image, but Varda slowly tilts the film outward, letting the city, other women and the looming presence of death reshape Cléo’s gaze. Shot with nouvelle vague verve but feminist clarity by one of the greatest and most idiosyncratic directors of all time, the film transforms vanity into vulnerability. Today, Cléo feels astonishingly modern: a reminder that cinema’s gaze is in itself a political act.
Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
This is the great German auteur Fassbinder at his most tender. Fear Eats the Soul follows a tentative romance between Emmi, an older German cleaner, and Ali, a Moroccan immigrant, charting how love becomes a lightning rod for society’s ugliest prejudices. Every frame is composed to isolate the couple within hostile spaces: doorways, stairwells, tables that suddenly feel miles wide. Inspired by Douglas Sirk but stripped of Hollywood gloss, the film understands racism not as spectacle but as suffocation. The title’s fractured grammar speaks volumes about linguistic exclusion and emotional damage. Its influence endures, a true masterclass in how melodrama can expose powerful truths without histrionics.
Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa)
Ikiru doesn’t ask what the meaning of life is; it asks what we do with the time society hasn’t stolen from us. Takashi Shimura’s Kanji Watanabe, a terminally ill Japanese civil servant, discovers that decades of rubber-stamping have left him absent from his own existence. Kurosawa charts his quiet awakening not through grand gestures but small, stubborn acts of purpose and the eventual creation of a children’s playground. The film’s second half, unfolding after Watanabe’s death, reframes heroism as something others barely notice, which makes it all the more worthwhile. That a life that will be soon forgotten can still have a beautiful legacy. The Academy would go on to acknowledge Kurosawa’s devastating humanism with a lifetime achievement award for one of cinema’s finest film-makers.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman)
Watching Jeanne Dielman is an act of radical attention. Akerman locks us into the rhythms of Jeanne’s domestic labour – peeling potatoes, making beds, enduring sex work clients – until routine itself becomes oppressive. There’s no melodrama, no shorthand, just time doing its quiet, corrosive work. When cracks appear, they’re seismic precisely because Akerman has trained us to notice every deviation. The film dismantles cinema’s impatience with women’s lives, insisting that what’s been deemed “boring” is actually brutal in its demands. Time has only elevated its status and in 2022, Sight and Sound crowned it the greatest film ever made. Jeanne didn’t change, but the world caught up.
The Piano Teacher (2001, Michael Haneke)
Haneke’s The Piano Teacher is a psychosexual nightmare that dares you to look away, and then asks why you can’t. Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, a repressed piano instructor at an elite music college in Vienna whose emotional life has been crushed by her overbearing mother. Desire emerges not as liberation but as something perverse, violent and twisted. Haneke offers no catharsis while Huppert delivers a performance precise and discomfiting. Cannes didn’t hesitate, awarding Huppert best actress and in the decades since she has delivered a litany of equally complex women to the screen. Her extraordinary films EO, Amour, Time Of The Wolf and Happy End also are available on BFI Player – but in The Piano Teacher in particular she creates cinema that refuses comfort, forcing us to consider how repression curdles into self-destruction.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024, Mohammad Rasoulof)
Rasoulof’s Oscar-nominated film turns the family home into a pressure cooker of state paranoia. When an Iranian investigating judge is promoted amid nationwide protests, the ideology he enforces begins to infect his domestic life, corroding trust with his daughters with devastating consequences. What starts as quiet unease escalates into something nightmarish, as authority seeps into every interaction. Rasoulof’s direction is controlled but furious, drawing a direct line between wider political repression and private terror. Released under extraordinary circumstances that saw the director arrested and forced to flee his homeland on an “exhausting, long, complicated, and anguishing journey” The Seed of the Sacred Fig fascinates as an act of defiance as well as a feat of thrilling storytelling.
Volver (2005, Pedro Almodóvar)
Volver is Almodóvar in glorious Technicolored bloom: funny, mournful, saturated with the complexities of life and affection for the women who endure it. Starring his muse Penélope Cruz as the alluring Raimunda, who shoulders violent secrets, while ghosts, both literal and emotional, torment her. The Spanish film reclaims melodrama as a feminist form, where survival is collective and memory refuses to stay buried. Cruz’s performance earned an Oscar nomination, a rare Academy nod to Almodóvar’s edgy matriarchal universe. Volver doesn’t shy away from trauma, but it insists on warmth, humour and the full spectrum of womanhood and cinema.
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