This year’s nominations for Best International Feature Film sketch a strikingly coherent portrait of contemporary world cinema. Across continents and styles, the five selected works share a commitment to political urgency, moral ambiguity, and formally considered storytelling. Rather than spectacle, they privilege attention: to bodies under pressure, to private grief shaped by public forces, and to histories that refuse to stay silent.
Below is a concise look at the five nominated films — each approaching the idea of “international cinema” not as a category, but as a shared terrain of experience.
The Secret Agent (Brazil, 2025)
A tense political drama anchored in surveillance, loyalty, and the ethics of resistance. The Secret Agent unfolds as a study of power operating through invisibility, where personal relationships are constantly compromised by the demands of ideology. Its controlled pacing and procedural clarity turn paranoia into atmosphere, suggesting that danger lies not only in action, but in waiting.
Sentimental Value (Norway, 2025)
Joachim Trier’s intimate family portrait explores inheritance as emotional gravity rather than material legacy. Centered on distance, memory, and the labor of care, Sentimental Value examines how family bonds persist even as intimacy erodes. Its quiet precision and restrained performances have positioned it as one of the most resonant European films of the year.
It Was Just an Accident (France, 2025)
What begins as a minor incident gradually reveals itself as a moral fracture. It Was Just an Accident traces how denial, guilt, and collective silence transform the ordinary into something corrosive. The film’s strength lies in its refusal to dramatize wrongdoing, focusing instead on the slow normalization of harm.
Sirat (Spain, 2025)
Set against vast landscapes and propelled by an enveloping rave soundtrack, Sirat follows a father and son on a physical and spiritual crossing through Morocco. Oliver Laxe treats movement as both endurance and inquiry, allowing sound, terrain, and bodily exhaustion to shape meaning. The result is a film that tests faith not through doctrine, but through experience.
The Voice of Hind Rajab (Tunisia, 2025)
Rooted in documentary testimony, The Voice of Hind Rajab gives form to a voice that might otherwise be lost to statistics and headlines. Through restraint and ethical attention, the film confronts violence, displacement, and erasure without mediation or spectacle. Its power lies in listening — and in insisting that listening itself is a political act.
Taken together, these five films point toward a cinema increasingly concerned with responsibility: who speaks, who is heard, and who carries the weight of history. Whether through fiction or documentary, intimacy or distance, each nominee engages with the present moment while resisting simplification.
Rather than offering a single vision of “international cinema,” this year’s selection reveals a constellation — five distinct works connected by their refusal to look away.
