Black Orpheus (1959), Marcel Camus – Brazil
This film relocates the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the slums of Rio de Janeiro during the Carnival. Marcel Camus’s exhilarating and dazzlingly colourful tragedy won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, and went onto win the Oscar, the Bafta and the Golden Globe for best foreign language film. More importantly, it introduced the samba rhythms of Antônio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá to new audiences. It’s problematic, though. In Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from my Father, he noted that while his mother loved the film, he was repulsed by its “depiction of… childlike blacks… a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas”. (Credit: Alamy)
I Am Cuba (1964), Mikhail Kalatozov – Cuba
Made in 1964 but rarely seen until its restoration in 1995, Mikhail Kalatozov’s hypnotic propaganda film delineates Cuban life before the overthrow of the Batista regime. It opens with a vignette that could be a companion piece to La Dolce Vita: moneyed tourists luxuriate at rooftop pool parties while the indigenous populace sinks into poverty. Three further sections show the despair of a sugar farmer, the martyrdom of a student revolutionary, and the radicalising of a peasant: you can tell the film was a Soviet co-production. But the gorgeous, gliding black-and-white camerawork takes I Am Cuba (or Soy Cuba) far above and beyond politics. “Watching this,” said Martin Scorsese, “I got excited about film-making again.” (Credit: Alamy)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967), Miloš Forman – Czechoslovakia
Miloš Forman, who died this year, is best known for the Oscar-winning Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But just before he emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the US, he made The Firemen’s Ball, shooting it in a small provincial town with a cast of locals who had never acted professionally before. The film is both a warm-hearted, rambling farce about some bumbling drunks organising a retirement party for a local fire chief (yes, things keep catching fire), and a daring satirical skewering of a corrupt and incompetent Soviet bureaucracy. The communist government wasn’t happy about the latter aspect, and The Firemen’s Ball was banned. (Credit: Alamy)
Siege (1969), Gilberto Tofano – Israel
Siege (or ‘Matzor’) tells the story of Tamar (Gila Almagor), a beautiful young Israeli widow whose paratrooper husband was killed in 1967’s Six-Day War. His close-knit relatives and friends expect her to play the public role of a nobly mournful war widow for the rest of her life. But Tamar, and the film, reject convention: she is desperate to find love and happiness instead. Almost 50 years after it premiered at Cannes, this New Wave-influenced classic still seems groundbreaking in both form and content: it intercuts scripted black-and-white drama and newsreel footage, and it views war from the perspective of the non-combatant survivors – female survivors at that. (Credit: Alamy)
Mapantsula (1988), Oliver Schmitz – South Africa
One of just two South African films on our list (the other being 2017’s The Wound), Mapantsula has been called “the first anti-apartheid feature film by, for and about black South Africans”, although its director Oliver Schmitz is actually white. His black co-writer, Thomas Mogotlane, stars as Panic, a cocky small-time gangster who isn’t interested in politics until he is thrown in jail, where his treatment both by the guards and the inmates pushes him to make a stand. Cutting back and forth between Panic’s interrogation and his earlier wild life in Johannesburg’s shopping malls and dancehalls, Mapantsula is so vibrant and vivid that you can practically smell the streets of Soweto. (Credit: Getty Images)
A Time for Drunken Horses (2000), Bahman Ghobadi – Kurdistan Province, Iran
A caption at the start of Bahman Ghobadi’s heart-wrenching film declares that it is a “humble tribute to my cultural heritage” and that “these people are not figments of my imagination”. There’s no doubt about that. Ghobadi may have crafted a grippingly plotted and elegantly shot narrative, but A Time for Drunken Horses, which is set in his home village, always comes across as a completely authentic account of Kurdish life, which is why it’s so devastating. Its hero is Ayoub, an orphaned boy who joins a gang of smugglers to help pay for an operation needed by his disabled brother Madi. As they stumble over the wind-battered mountains, the conditions are so harsh that the mules need alcohol-spiked water to keep them going, hence the title. Viewers may need a stiff drink after they’ve watched it, too. (Credit: Alamy)
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), Zacharias Kunuk – Canada
Never mind The Revenant. At least Leonardo DiCaprio got to wear fur as he trekked through the wilderness. But for Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, Natar Ungalaaq had to run stark naked through Arctic snow and ice, as his title character flees from a tribal thief’s murderous son. Based on an Inuit legend, Zacharias Kunuk’s Shakespearean tale of betrayal, ambition, feuds and traditions was the first film to have an Inuit writer-director, cast and crew, along with dialogue that is entirely in the Inuktitut language. A poll taken at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival named it as the best Canadian film ever made. (Credit: Alamy)
Daratt (2006), Mahamat Saleh Haroun – Chad
In Daratt, or “Dry Season”, the teenage Atim (Ali Bacha Barkai) is handed a gun by his grandfather, and sent off to take revenge on the man who killed his father 20 years earlier in the civil war. But when Atim finds the killer (Youssouf Djaoro), now a kindly old baker, he is given a job and a place to sleep. Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s powerful fable of revenge and redemption is a quiet personal story about the feelings of a handful of characters, but its real subject is whether war-torn Chad can ever heal itself: civil war broke out again during the production. (Credit: Alamy)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Thailand
Uncle Boonmee… was the first ever Thai film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and went on to be a critical hit around the world, which meant that it became many cineastes’ first taste of Thai cinema – and what a taste. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s mysterious chronicle of a dying man’s final days in the jungle is digressive, meditative and woozily surreal. It makes sly references to cinema history and contemporary technology. But it also transports viewers into an ancient, mythical past where ghosts pop in for dinner, a princess has sex with a catfish, and a yeti-like monster with glowing red eyes might just be someone’s long-lost son. (Credit: Alamy)
Wadjda (2012), Haifaa al-Mansour – Saudi Arabia
Wadjda is not only the first full-length feature film to be shot in Saudi Arabia, but the first film to have a female Saudi director: Haifaa al-Mansour had to direct its Riyadh street scenes while hiding in the back of a van, so she wouldn’t be seen mixing with men. Its heroine is a tough 10-year-old girl (Waad Mohammed) who proves to be as crafty and determined as Tom Sawyer as she tries to raise enough money to buy the bike of her dreams. Wadjda catalogues various types of misogynistic oppression in Saudi Arabia, but it is funny, heartwarming and ultimately positive enough to inspire girls (and boys) of any nationality. (Credit: Alamy)
Norte, the End of History (2013), Lav Diaz – Philippines
Two hundred and fifty minutes of long takes and static cameras, Norte, the End of History may sound like hard work, but the mini-series running time allows its director, Lav Diaz, to include the tiny everyday details that most films cut out, and to ponder such gargantuan themes as evil, global capitalism, spirituality and atheism. And for Diaz, a four-hour movie pretty much counts as a short. The only Filipino film in our poll, this captivating crime saga examines the fates of a privileged student radical (Sid Lucero) who commits a murder, a poor villager (Archie Alemania) who is wrongly convicted of it, and the woman (Angeli Bayani) who has to provide for her family while her husband is serving a life sentence. Critics compared it to the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but there isn’t another film like it. (Credit: Alamy)
Embrace of the Serpent (2015), Ciro Guerra – Colombia
The Oscar-nominated Embrace of the Serpent focuses on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and the last survivor of a tribe wiped out by colonists. Played as a young man by Nilbio Torres and as his older incarnation by Antonio Bolivar, Karamakate is seen in 1909 and 1940, guiding white scientists on two expeditions through the rain forest in search of a legendary plant with healing properties. Ciro Guerra’s spectacular monochrome epic makes these river journeys as immersive and eerie as those in Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: The Wrath of God – only this time the film-makers and the hero are from the country where the film is set, rather than visiting from far away. (Credit: Alamy)