The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film is one of the ten categories at the annual Oscars that publicizes a shortlist of the 15 films that may become one of the five nominees for the category when the final votes are cast. It is also the only category where the Academy cannot choose whatever film it wants, as each country can nominate only one film for consideration per year. This makes following the awards race for the 97th Academy Awards’ Best International Feature fascinating and political. Plus, it’s easier for movie-goers to narrow down their watchlist of potential nominees in advance.
What’s missing from the 2025 Oscars International Shortlist?
90 countries submitted films for the 2025 Oscars ceremony, celebrating films released in 2024. Notable international films missing from the submissions include All We Imagine as Light, which India allegedly passed over out of political retribution toward the director, Payal Kapadia. Sujo, Laapataa Ladies, and The Devil’s Bath, Mexico, India, and Austria’s respective popular entries were selected for consideration by their countries but were not shortlisted this year.
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Additionally, movies like Housekeeping for Beginners, La Chimera, and The Monk and the Gun were not eligible this year because they qualified for the previous year’s Oscars despite wide releases in the U.S. in 2024. Nevertheless, these are the 15 films that made the 2025 Oscars’ shortlist for Best International Feature.
Armand
Director: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Writer: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel
Country: Norway
When a 6-year-old boy named Armand is accused by his peer of sexually harassing him, the school launches a wildly inappropriate response that leaves no room to hear Armand’s side of the story, or his mother’s, Elisabeth (Renate Reinsve). Instead, the movie is a tense round of accusations and personal revelations about Elisabeth as a mother and a person driven by rumors, horrendous pedagogy, and personal animus.
Reinsve soars per usual through long, drawn-out emotional battles and dream dance sequences. However, the administrators’ and educators’ horrendous pedagogy and behavior make Armand difficult to watch. Their behavior is normalized and rarely pushed back against. Instead, the movie tries to empathize with their behavior—a fatal mistake.
Armond is distributed by IFC Films.
Dahomey
Director: Mati Diop
Writer: Mati Diop, Makenzy Orcel
Country: Senegal
Dahomey is a unique documentary. It’s about the repatriation of artifacts from France back to Benin. The film’s first half is shot from the vantage point of the artifacts themselves. Few words are spoken as the objects are handled, packed, and shipped. A stark narration gives the occasional voice to the artifacts. In the second half, screentime is split between university students debating the merits and demerits of this repatriation project and scenes of museum-goers and dignitaries viewing the artifacts for the first time since they were stolen. The film is a study on what’s gained and lost through these efforts and what the passage of time means to a statue.
Dahomey is streaming now on Mubi.
Emilia Pérez
Director: Jacques Audiard
Writer: Jacques Audiard
Country: France
Thanks to Emilia Pérez, a musical graces the 2025 Best International Feature Oscars shortlist. A Netflix Original, Emilia Pérez is easily the most controversial movie on the list. Audiences and critics alike are split tp the extremes. Some seemingly adore it for its big swings and great performances by Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña. However, many others malign it for its orientalism, meager characterization, and nonsensical dialogue and lyrics. A Mexican drug lord (Gascón) calls upon a high-powered layer, Rita (Saldaña), to help facilitate an escape from the country and a sex change operation.
When Emilia Pérez emerges, she reenlists Rita to help her find her kids and former wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez). The musical antics and highlighting of the plight of disappeared women in Mexico are no doubt effective. However, director Audiard’s outsider perspective to the entire affair washes the movie with an unshakable insincerity and lack of authority, regardless of the actors’ clear lived experiences.
Emilia Pérez is steaming now on Netflix.
Flow
Director: Gints Zilbalodis
Writer: Gints Zilbalodis, Matiss Kaza
Country: Latvia
Flow (Straume) is unique in the 2025 Best International Feature Shortlist as the only animated feature included. The movie conveys a universe of truths about humanity and its natural responses to crises without speaking a single word. A slightly anthropomorphized cat, capibara, golden retriever, bird, and lemur must learn to work together to survive a catastrophic flood. By the end, these animals will teach you more about humanity than many movies about humans ever will.
From Ground Zero
Directors: Wissam Moussa, Nidal Damo Alaa Ayoub Karim Satoum Bashar Al Babisi Khamis Masharawi Neda’a Abu Hassnah Tamer Nijim Ahmed Al Danaf Rima Mahmoud Muhammad Al Sharif Basil El Maqousi Mustafa Al Nabih Rabab Khamis Mustafa Kulab Alaa Damo Hana Eleiwa Mahdi Kreirah Aws Al Banna Islam Al Zeriei Etimad Washah Ahmad Hassunah
Country: Palestine
From Ground Zero is a collection of 22 short films from 22 Palestinian directors demonstrating their lives under occupation and potential genocide. Not a single one of the films is easy to look at, which is precisely why they must exist and must be seen. The styles are distinct, ranging from pure documentary to reenactment to fiction. Some show people trying to make normalcy out of hell, while others are just there to show you what hell looks like. Every entry makes you plea for an end to the violence, consequences for the oppressors, and a world where these artists can create unencumbered.
From Ground Zero is playing now in theaters.
The Girl with the Needle
Director: Magnus von Horn
Writer: Magnus von Horn, Line Langebek Knudsen
Country: Denmark
As WWI ends, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) suspects her husband will not return. Refusing to live a life of destitution, she becomes involved with the boss of her textile shop in an attempt to raise her station and stave off poverty. But when she becomes pregnant and he rejects her, Karoline goes to unthinkable ends to keep herself alive.
The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med Nålen) is a harrowing examination of motherhood, adoption, abortion, and society’s inherent hatred of women and children. Its scenes are often framed to cramp everyone into a narrow frame inside an already narrow aspect ratio. The black-and-white depiction makes everything even more bleak. It’s an excellent film you will only ever want to watch once.
The Girl with the Needle is distributed by Mubi.
How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies
Director: Pat Boonnitipat
Writer: Pat Boonnitipat, Thodsapon Thiptinnakorn
Country: Thailand
Death is inevitable in How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies (Lahn Mah). However, what matters most is how we spend our time with loved ones before the end. What starts as a ploy to ensure that M (Putthipong Assaratanakul) gets a good inheritance from his Amah (Usha Seamkhum) when she dies soon quickly becomes a series of lessons in patience, kindness, and love.
But unlike so many films with similar themes, the colors remain bright for most of the movie. Kitsch and poverty muddle the juxtapositions between tradition and modernity. This is a perfect example of a movie about the journey rather than the destination.
How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies is available now on VOD.
I’m Still Here
Director: Walter Salles
Writer: Murilo Hauser, Heitor Lorega
Country: Brazil
At once a thriller and a family drama, I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui) captures what truly makes fascism so horrifying. It comes in slowly, and even as you can track its rise, most people of modest means never expect that it will come to harm them. It’s why spending the first third of the movie watching a happy family and their insignificant squabbles transitions so horrifyingly into a political and personal nightmare.
In a field of international feature shortlist films about political strife, I’m Still Here stands out with the best performance. Fernanda Torres does a remarkable job as her family’s matriarch portraying the horrifying circumstances she’s living through while shielding her children from it as much as possible.
I’m Still Here is distributed by Sony Pictures.
Kneecap
Director: Rich Peppiatt
Writer: Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, and JJ Ó Dochartaigh
Country: Ireland
Kneecap is a real Irish hip-hop group who play themselves in a fictionalized version of their band’s rise in the film Kneecap. Naoise and Liam are hooligans toying around with music and running from cops like Detective Ellis (Josie Walker) who still believe that Naoise’s father Arlo (Michael Fassbender) faked his death and works with the IRA.
When the boys meet school teacher JJ, they impress upon him what Arlo taught them: that every word of Irish spoken is a bullet against their oppression. As they form Kneecap and and take the nation by storm, the film endears not only these characters but the plight of all Ireland against British oppression, which still prevalent today. The music is also fantastic.
Kneecap is streaming now on Netflix.
Santosh
Director: Sandhya Suri
Writer: Sandhya Suri
Country: United Kingdom
The lineage of Indian police dramas is long, but few if any are quite like Santosh. When Santosh’s (Shahana Goswami) husband is killed in the line of duty, she is given the opportunity to take his place on the police force. At first, she merely faces the obvious sexism one would expect from her male colleagues and perpetrators alike. But then she throws herself into the depths of a complicated murder case when none of the male police will hear the case themselves.
Santosh is put under the jurisdiction of a female superior officer, Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), where she has to learn the hard way what kinds of justice are and are not permissible within their police system, especially when it comes to women and Muslim victims. The notion of “just following” orders is put into a unique perspective in Santhosh thanks to a non-traditional police cast of women in a non-traditional Muslim setting.
Santosh is distributed by Metrograph Pictures.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof
Writer: Mohammad Rasoulof
Country: Germany
The story behind The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Dâne-ye Anjîr-e Ma’âbed) is the most powerful among the 2025 shortlist films. It was made in secret by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof and smuggled out of the country with him to international markets after a career, and a life, repeatedly threatened by the Iranian government. While it is not the first and likely not the last Iranian movie with a harrowing backstory, it is remarkable in a year when so many of its contemporaries are about the eternal fight against fascism, imperialism, and the destruction of art.
Here, Iman (Missagh Zareh) is promoted to be an investigative judge during a contentious period in real-life contemporary Iranian history. Nationwide student protests against the government, against modesty laws, and against the disappearance of protestors tears away at Iman’s family. His two student-aged daughters are directly affected by the protests and sympathetic to their cause. But being a government representative puts Iman’s entire family in danger as the protests grow.
The film triangulates the growing youth protest movement, the difficulty of their parents’ generation to understand the merit of protest when their lives are so otherwise stable, and the line between actively supporting the regime and passively supporting it by remaining silent. The Seed of the Sacred Fig also dares to use real-life videos of the protests mixed to blur the line between fiction and reality while illustrating how dire the real-life circumstances really are.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is coming soon to VOD.
Touch
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Writer: Olaf Olafsson
Country: Iceland
Touch (Snerting) is the 2025 Best International Feature’s only pure romance. It’s a beautiful time-hopping and continent-crossing story about an Icelandic student, Kroistófer (Egill Ólafsson, Palmi Kormákur), who quits his studies in London to work in a Japanese restaurant. Here, he meets Miko (Yôko Narahashi, Kôki), with whom he quickly falls in love. Decades later, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kroistófer is suddenly obsessed with finding Miko again and will stop at nothing until he does.
While the movie sometimes switches back and forth too many times too quickly, and the pandemic setting feels like it detracts from the emotionality of the tale rather than adding to it because it is so trivialized, it is otherwise splendid. Young Kroistófer’s sincerity at every turn renders him utterly charming. He lacks pretense and respects Miko’s circumstances and her whims, but his immediate admiration drives him to quietly learn Japanese and traditional cooking from her father, the restaurant’s owner (Masahiro Motoki). Even if most of Touch’s steps are predictable, its configuration of characters and settings are unique and refreshing. Plus, it’s hard not to love Kroistófer and Miko.
Universal Language
Director: Matthew Rankin
Writer: Matthew Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati
Country: Canada
Universal Language (Une Langue Universelle) is an absolutely sensational blend of uncommon elements. Its influences range from the French New Wave, to the Iranian masters like Mohammad Rasoulof and Abbas Kiarostami, to American greats like Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson. The beautiful blend of styles and influences imagines a Winnipeg, Canada as an “interzone” city, as the director calls it. It’s Winnipeg, but it’s also Tehran. The main language is Persian, the street signs are written in Arabic, but the Tim Hortons is still the local coffee/tea store and the winter is still frozen over.
The sharp cuts of the French New Wave demarcate Quebec from the distinctly Iranian Winnipeg, cut together with fadeaways and lit with a Malick-like naturalness to give the main character Matthew (Matthew Rankin) an immediate sense of homecoming upon his arrival. Universal Language masterfully combines the surreal stage-like elements and odd characters and circumstances of a Wes Anderson film with the fiction and reality-blending nature of Iranian New Wave classics to create something truly special. It’s equal parts a warm hug from a home you’ve left behind and a cold stare from a place that has never known you at all.
Universal Language is distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Vermiglio
Director: Maura Delpero
Writer: Maura Delpero
Country: Italy
In the dying days of WWII, a small town in the Italian Alps, Vermiglio, is shaken up by the arrival of an army deserter who falls in love with one of the many daughters of the local teacher (Tommaso Ragno). The movie moves as slowly as life itself until suddenly, time flies by like it always does.
Scandal rocks people’s lives as the family patriarch philosophizes and puts his hand firmly in the middle of each of his children’s streams. What begins as a beautiful portrait of a frigid town slowly devolves into a treatise on how men’s whims and actions rule women’s lives. It’s a beautiful and thoughtful movie, but also languid and sometimes dull.
Vermigilio is distributed by Sideshow and Janus Films.
Waves
Director: Jirí Mádl
Writer: Jirí Mádl
Country: Czech Republic
Unfortunately, we were not able to watch Waves (2024) before this article’s publication deadline. We look forward to providing a review when it is made available to us.
Waves (Vlny) is a Cold War drama and the third-highest-grossing Czech film of all time. It is about journalists at the Editorial Office of International Life of the Czechoslovak Radio who were surveilled by the state during the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. The star of the film, Tomáš Havlík (Vojtech Vodochodský), has to decide between protecting his family or helping broadcast uncensored information to the public about the invasion with calls for passive resistance.
The lineup for the 2025 Oscars’ Best International Feature shortlist is quite strong. While it has its share of treacly dramas and war films, it also has movies with brave politics, exemplary creative visions, and stand-out performances.
The final nominees for the 2025 Oscars will be announced on January 23rd. The ceremony will take place on March 2nd.
