What? There are movies made outside the U.S.? It’s true – in fact there are some phenomenal films produced throughout Europe, Asia, and if penguins had cameras, they’d be making beautiful films in Antarctica as well. Here are three of our favourites.
Persepolis (France)
In 2007, Iranian graphic novelist and author Marjane Satrapi worked with French comic artist Vincent Paronnaud to adapt her 2000 autobiographic graphic novel Persepolis into an animated film. The resulting film is at once moving, funny, educating, and artistically innovative. With the backdrops of the Iranian protests against the US-backed Shah, the Iranian Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq war, Persepolis tells the story of a young girl coming of age.
In addition to the usual childhood and young adult struggles of love, rebellion, and friendship, the film follows Marji as she grapples with political and social oppression, the unappreciated privilege of others during her time studying abroad in Vienna, and her identity as an Iranian. For many Western viewers, Persepolis will offer a shocking and completely new perspective on Iran, a country generally portrayed by our media and government as villainous and entirely antithetical to the West. In that context, it can be hard to remember that a country’s government and laws oftentimes don’t reflect the people who live there. Persepolis offers a humanising look at life in Iran and serves as a reminder that humans have much more in common than that which sets us apart.
Wings of Desire (West Germany)
First introduced to Wim Wenders’ 1987 classic as a child, I most certainly didn’t understand its beautiful complexities. Later, I re-watched Wings of Desire while studying in Düsseldorf. The film follows a group of angels living in Berlin. Though the angels can see and hear the thoughts of the troubled mortals, the Berliners cannot see the angels. One such angel, played by Bruno Ganz, decides to give up his immortality for the love of a trapeze artist.
Suddenly he can see, feel, taste, and fully experience the human condition in all its beauty and pain. The German film was so popular that it was later remade into a thoroughly awful Hollywood film starring Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan. Lacking all of the complexity and cinematic creativity (Wings of Desire was shot both in sepia tone and color), City of Angels was remarkably forgettable. Perhaps my favourite aspect of Wings of Desire is the atypical treatment of the love story – it’s not the central focus of the film, but rather a small part of the angel’s journey.
Bicycle Thieves (Italy)
Italian neorealism made a tremendous impact on the ways movies can be made. In some ways the tradition was born out of necessity: filmmakers in the late 1940s and 1950s working in postwar countries simply had no access to funds for studio sets, professional equipment, and actor price tags. Instead, filmmakers like Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Luchino Visconti took to the actual streets of Italian cities, filming non-professional actors in real-life locations.
De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, often the primary example of Italian neorealism, tells the story of a poor man who obtains a job pasting film posters all over Rome. In order to accept the job, his wife pawns some bed linen in order to buy back his bicycle. On his first day of work, his bicycle gets stolen, and he spends the rest of the film trying to get it back.
What came out of (or perhaps coincided with) these budgetary restrictions was the urge to tell real stories of real people dealing with real struggles. And so, the films of the Italian neorealist movement dealt with tales of poverty, under-representation, and the struggles of postwar life. Additionally, the movement paved the way for independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes in America and Satyajit Ray in India.
