As the 95th Academy Awards are approaching next month, anticipation for our favourite films to win is also high. Therefore, we bring you the 10 best Oscar winning International feature films of the last decade, that broke many records and won over everyone with their amazing story, acting, direction and everything else.
10 Best Oscar Winning International Feature Films
2021 – Drive My Car
Drive My Car is a Japanese film adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The story follows two years after his wife’s unexpected death. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct Uncle Vanya’s production at a Hiroshima theatre festival.
There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a reserved young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koji Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins with the help of his driver – to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind.
Watch this film on Amazon Prime Video.
2020 – Another Round
Another Round is a Danish comedy-drama film, starring Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang, and Lars Ranthe. Directed by Tomas Vinterberg, where four high school teachers consume alcohol on a daily basis to see how it affects their social and professional lives. They hope to test a theory to prove that it will improve their lives by maintaining a constant level of alcohol in their blood.
Watch it on Amazon Prime Video.
2019 – Parasite
Often tagged as a dark modern-day fairytale or a social commentary, in this film Greed and class discrimination threaten the relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim family in Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar winner, which broke many records. It is the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and diverted attention to the South Korean film industry which has many gems like this.
You can watch this 2019 film on Amazon Prime Video.
2018 – Roma
Roma is a Mexican Drama film, written & directed by Alfonso Cuarón. It follows Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a young domestic worker for a family in the middle-class neighbourhood of Roma in Mexico City. Director Cuarón draws on his own childhood to create a vivid and emotional portrait of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst the political turmoil of the 1970s.
Watch it on Netflix.
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2017 – A Fantastic Woman
A Fantastic Woman is a Chilean drama film directed by Sebastián Lelio, written by Lelio and Gonzalo Maza, and starring Daniela Vega and Francisco Reyes. It follows Marina, a transgender nightclub singer, who comes under suspicion when her much older lover Orlando dies suddenly. After being harassed and threatened by her late boyfriend’s vengeful relatives and the police, she must defend her rights as both Orlando’s partner and as a human being.
Watch it on Amazon Prime Video.
2016 – The Salesman
The Salesman is an Iranian film, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi and starring Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini. It tells the story of Emad and Rana, a married couple who act in the theatre and are currently performing in a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
When their apartment building nearly collapses, they’re forced to move. Their new apartment was previously occupied by a prostitute. Emad and Rana do not find this out until after a shocking moment of violence, which dramatically changes the young couple’s life. It explores the themes of trauma and revenge. Watch it on Amazon Prime Video.
2015 – Son of Saul
Set in 1944, Saul Ausländer is a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando, the group of Jewish prisoners isolated from the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son.
As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task: save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish and offer the boy a proper burial. It is a Hungarian historical drama film directed by László Nemes and stars Géza Röhrig in the lead.
Watch it on Amazon Prime Video.
2014 – Ida
Ida is a Polish drama film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and co-written with Rebecca Lenkiewicz. This emotional portrait follows 18-year-old Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), a sheltered orphan raised in a convent, who is preparing to become a nun when the Mother Superior insists she first visits her sole living relative.
Anna soon finds herself in the presence of her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a worldly and cynical Communist Party insider, who shocks her with the declaration that her real name is Ida and her Jewish parents were murdered during the Nazi occupation. This revelation triggers a heart-wrenching journey into the countryside, to the family house and into the secrets of the repressed past, evoking the haunting legacy of the Holocaust and the realities of postwar Communism.
Watch this film on Amazon Prime Video.
2013 – The Great Beauty
The Great Beauty is an Italian art film co-written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. The story follows journalist Jep Gambardella who has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city’s literary and elite social circles.
But on his sixty-fifth birthday, Jep unexpectedly finds himself looking back at his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the lavish nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome itself, in all its monumental glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty.
Watch it on Apple TV+.
2012 – Amour
Amour is an Austrian romantic drama film, written and directed by Michael Haneke. The film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva and Isabelle Huppert. Following an elderly couple Georges and Anne who are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, also a musician, lives in Britain with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple’s bond of love is severely tested.
Watch this film on Amazon Prime Video.
Which of the films mentioned above did you find the best? Let us know in the comment section below.
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