It’s deflating to see international cinema minimised in the BAFTA longlists and elsewhere, in a politically unsettling year when we need international voices to be part of the conversation.
If you typically follow international cinema, there’s always a slew of great movies released every year from around the world, but 2025 has felt like a particularly striking year. Perhaps that’s in part down to the continuingly ‘unprecedented times’ we’re muddling through – artists responding to trauma and flux with stories that document, challenge and make sense of a changing and often unjust world. With awards season upon us, it was reasonable to hope that some of these stories might translate to industry recognition, helping to widen their reach.
Hopes were high for a number of this year’s marquee releases from around the world. For champions of Brazilian cinema, The Secret Agent is of course the one to watch, kicking off a long and blistering Oscars campaign with a triple win at Cannes this year (Best Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho; Best Actor: Wagner Moura; FIPRESCI Competition Prize).
Strong offerings have emerged from other countries, including but by no means limited to:
➤ Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (an actor’s film if ever there was one);
➤ It Was Just an Accident by the almost unbearably courageous Jafar Panahi, who has continued to make films despite and even – ingeniously – during sentences of imprisonment in Iran;
➤ the irrepressible Park Chan-Wook with No Other Choice, a funny but damning satire on workers pushed too far by corporate exploitation;
➤ Oliver Laxe’s stunning and hallucinogenic road movie Sirāt;
➤ and multiple films about Palestine, including Annemarie Jacir’s historical documentary Palestine 36 and the devastating The Voice of Hind Rajab by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania.
Only one – Sentimental Value – was admitted to the BAFTA longlist for Best Film. According to their voting collective, F1 and The Ballad of Wallis Island are better than literally any other non-English language film released in the last year (and of course a lot of Sentimental Value’s dialogue is in English). Otherwise the list is an unsurprising who’s who of the year’s big films: Sinners, One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme et al.
Recognition for international films is thin on the ground in anglophone countries, and where sweet success comes, it carries the vinegary taint of disrespect.
The snubs continue across the other categories. Palestine is a forgotten issue among the documentary films. Trier and Ben Hania at least make it into the Best Director category, but the pattern worsens in the Actor categories – just one international representative per Actress/Supporting Actress list, and not one non-Anglophone name in the Best Actor category, where many expected to see Moura.
Stellan Skarsgård shows up as a Best Supporting Actor contender; perhaps Sentimental Value was the only international film some of the BAFTA voting members watched this year. The Secret Agent finally gets nods in the Best International Film and Screenplay categories… small consolation for fans of a film that received such thunderous critical acclaim in recent months.
It was a similar story at the Critics Choice Awards last week, with Kleber Mendonça Filho and producer Emilie Lesclaux’s Best International Film award presented to them in a trivial manner on the red carpet, and, unsurprisingly, some of the guild awards (Actors Awards – formerly the Screen Actors Guild Awards – and the Directors’ Guild Awards). English only please!
The guild lists aren’t a great surprise, with an ongoing habit of ignoring international movies; backed by their unions, these awards tend to favour their members, and in some cases films are marked as ineligible for entry if outside the membership (this was indeed the case for The Secret Agent at the DGAs). Yet, with these limiting boundaries, they are still talked about as signposts for the Oscars race, which has to be aggravating for anyone running a campaign for one of these films.
As the English-speaking industries continue to sideline their international peers, they’re skipping past top-tier filmmaking that responds urgently to today’s issues, possibilities and traumas. For those hoping for some tropical recognition, the exclusions and red The Secret Agent stings. And yet others rewarded it. Brazil has been in a state of jubilation since the film’s historic double win at the Golden Globes, reviving its Oscars hopes – along with the Astra Awards’ honouring Moura with an Acting Achievement Award this weekend). Yet Mendonça Filho was the only recipient interrupted by music playing him off the stage, just as he was encouraging young American filmmakers to use their craft and document their reality. Notably, he and Moura were the only winners to use their speeches to highlight film’s ability to speak truth to power.
Even as things are looking up for The Secret Agent, the systemic problem persists. Recognition for international films is thin on the ground in English-speaking countries, and where sweet success comes, it carries the vinegary taint of disrespect.
Containing these films to the singular and crowded Best International Film category dents their trajectory toward the Oscars. And while some fans pooh-pooh the industry backslapping of awards season, as Amanda Seyfried recently explained, even just being nominated gets you ‘on a list’ with fellow filmmakers for future projects. So it does matter.
But something more vital is missing here. The world is in turmoil. Trump’s US administration is on a demented inward turn, divesting from numerous international agreements; terrorising brown and Black people (Latinos and Somalis in particular) at home with indiscriminate and violent ICE roundups for citizens and immigrants alike, and abroad with its recent unprovoked attack on Venezuela; and now threatening Greenland, Cuba and Iran.
Iran is going through its own upheaval, with massive ground-level protests against the current regime complicated by the appearance of the former Shah’s son as a would-be contender, and of course the US and Israel’s evergreen hostility.
European nations, alarmed by Trump’s international aggression, are talking about tooling up again, and the UK’s special relationship is looking like more of a liability with every passing day.
And in the background of all of it, far-right movements and insistently racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant voices persist, both in rhetoric and policy.
Such times galvanise artists, and indeed the weighty themes present in this year’s big releases back that theory; dictatorship, assassination, corruption, apartheid, imprisonment and torture, language, love and loss. Filmmakers this year have a lot to say, but apparently the English-speaking cinema industries don’t want to hear it.
It’s at moments like this, when division, discrimination and suspicious tribalism are on the rise, that we most need to hear diverse voices and stories. We need reminders that we aren’t so different from the people we glimpse on the news or in traumatic videos on social media. We need to reinforce our connections with our neighbours, be they the immigrant family next door or nations and peoples under threat. We need to hear stories about authoritarian regimes so that we may recognise and resist them when they rear their heads among us, and learn the lessons from those who’ve survived them.
It’s incredibly disappointing that the voters of an awards event with the gravitas of the BAFTAs didn’t think any of this was relevant this year, and instead opted to favour the peers whose language they comfortably speak as they clink drinks at the awards show. The ugly implication is that their otherness is their only defining quality. #OscarsSoWhite wasn’t so very long ago, yet the lessons don’t seem to have been learned.
With division, discrimination and authoritarianism on the rise, we need to hear diverse voices and stories, reinforcing our connections with our neighbours and learning from their survival.
Artists are one of the first groups targeted by those who deal in oppression and injustice, and so we must be staunch in backing them, especially when they have the courage, the insight and the tenacity to tell difficult stories that we all need to hear. The boomerang effect is real, as increasingly frightened US citizens are finding out, with militarised violence that used to take place overseas now storming their cities and front lawns. Safety cannot be found at home any more. Now more than ever, we need to platform international artists and stories and learn from them as we navigate these dark and uncertain times.
And when those with the most contempt for art seek to divide us in order to pick off the vulnerable and the marginalised, the stories we amplify must centre these voices and remind us of how connected we really are.
Image: licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.