My BFF Project: December 2017

Starting in June 2016, I watched and reviewed every winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, or in short, Best Foreign Film (BFF), in reverse chronological order from the 2015 entry to the awards inception in 1947 (watching the 2016 winner at the end). Part of the experiment was to see how many of these I would be able to find. In most cases, I was able to borrow the DVD of each film from the Cuyahoga County Library system (a consistently top rated system in Northeast Ohio), and as things went further back in time, that meant using the inter-library systems CCL employs, SearchOhio and OhioLINK. I did have to watch a couple on the dusty old VCR. On two or three occasions when I couldn’t find the movie through the CCL system, I was able to get DVDs from the Cleveland Public Library. Once I paid $2 to watch a movie on Amazon, and that was the grand total of money I spent on this project. I did find a couple rare films online, having exhausted every other possibility. Only once was I not able to find a film at all, at least with English subtitles, and that was 1950’s The Walls of Malapaga. I watched it only in French with Portuguese subtitles, and decided to review it anyway.

My reviews were intended for people who don’t normally watch foreign films, a group that included me not all that long ago. I found a lot of the movies worth watching, not just ones you might see at an art house, but movies I am convinced would have been mainstream American favorites had they been in English. I also sat through a lot of tedious, self-admiring crap that got awards for having the right political or social view to the voters of the Academy. But enough about The Sea Inside. My goal was to make the reviews be entertaining, especially when the movie wasn't, and to give American viewer something they could relate to.

The list here is my amateurish attempt to rank what is perhaps the unrankable. There are a variety of genres and so many different cultures represented here that it is almost unfair to compare them against each other. But I did anyway, and the films are listed below from best to worst. Click any movie title to read the review. You can follow me on Twitter at @hawley5150.

Enjoy!

1989, Cinema Paradiso, Italy

2006, The Lives of Others, Germany

1951, Rashomon, Japan

1998, Life Is Beautiful, Italy

1957, La Strada, Italy

1949, The Bicycle Thief, Italy

2011, A Separation, Iran

1975, Dersu Uzala, Soviet Union

1967, Closely Watched Trains, Czechoslovakia

1947, Shoeshine, Italy

1964, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Italy

1963, 8½, Italy