2026 Academy Awards

2026 International Films

Eighty-six nations entered films in the International Category of the Academy Awards. I have seen 72 of them, as well as four more that were entered but disqualified.

For the first time in five years, Academy voters nominated a film directed by a woman: The Voice of Hind Rajab, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania.

My tastes definitely differs from those of Academy voters. The winner, Sentimental Value, was not in my top ten, and one of the nominated films, Sirat, wasn’t even in my top thirty.

Ten different films dealt with the political and human rights conditions in the Middle East, including two of the nominated films. It Was Just an Accident from France deals with torture committed by the Iranian government. The Voice of Hind Rajab is about the murder of civilians in Gaza by Israeli soldiers.

In the Iranian film Cause of Death: Unknown, one of the characters is an anti-government dissident who is trying to escape Iran. The Israeli film, The Sea, is about a Palestinian boy who defies the Israeli authorities because he wants to see the sea and his father who risks arrest to find his son. All That’s Left of You from Jordan tells the story of the family of a Palestinian teenager who is shot by Israeli soldiers. The President’s Cake from Iraq centers on Saddam Hussein’s personality cult and the people who were willing to carry out his orders. Palestine 36, the Palestinian submission, is about the brutal ways that the British and Jewish settlers humiliated and destroyed the lives of Palestinian civilians. Eagles of the Republic from Sweden is a harsh attack on the current dictatorship in Egypt. The Turkish film, One of the Days When Hemme Dies, deals with income inequality and the exploitation of poor workers. The Lebanese film, A Sad and Beautiful World, is a romantic comedy, but the characters cannot escape the war-related collapse of the economy of Beirut.

Two of the most overlooked films are ripe for English-language remakes. The Bhutanese film, I, The Song, is about a woman whose life is ruined when a video clip of her engaging in explicit sex is released on the internet—except it isn’t her. So she embarks on an odyssey to track down the real woman in the video clip. In the aforementioned Iranian film, Cause of Death: Unknown, the driver of a rural shuttle van and his passengers discover that a nameless fellow passenger has died with a large amount of cash in his bag.

During the Oscar viewing season, I urged anyone who would listen that I thought they should view Mr. Nobody Against Putin. However almost no one had even heard of it, much less seen it. Fortunately, it eventually did make the rounds, and it won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

As I have previously noted, the tobacco industry has overwhelmed international cinema with product placements. This year I counted only ten of the 72 films I have seen that did not show at least one person smoking tobacco.

Because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreigners who are not white, the filmmakers of the entries from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam were not allowed to enter the United States because their visa applications were denied.

My favorite International film of the year? Late Shift from Switzerland.