The Importance of Foreign Films

I believe that watching foreign films is not a waste of time and energy because they allow the viewer to be exposed to new forms of life, they, more often than American films, grant viewers the opportunity to watch more consistently thought-provoking films and are quite often not made with a primary goal being the largest profit possible, making for more artistic and realistic films.

Foreign films expose the viewer to various examples of lives and experiences that cannot be as accurately portrayed if the film were not created in the foreign country and spoken in the foreign language. When a film is presented with its original language being anything other than English typically, the film was created in a foreign country, an exception to this rule being the occasional anomaly of North American films starring minority cultures that use foreign languages and Québec films. Behind every foreign language is a history complete with information of where the language originates, how many speak it, the implications of speaking it, etc. An example of such a use of language is the film Whale Rider and despite the film’s primary language being English and the film having been made in New Zealand, a predominantly English speaking country, the film offers an inside look into the Māori culture. Using the Māori language - a language with approximately 157 000 speakers, nearly all of which live in New Zealand - when the film was released in North America, it exposed audiences to the dialect they were likely not familiar with. In the film itself, Māori is not the primary language used by the majority of the characters, yet it is consistently used by the elder people of the film in order to showcase the language’s cultural significance.

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...orting characters, and then cast several hockey players to portray characters with fewer (if any) lines. These hockey players were cast as they were much more easily capable of representing the physical appearance and abilities of genuine hockey players, as compared to trained actors who would likely bear little resemblance to the hockey players to be portrayed. By committing to realism and raw artistic abilities, foreign film studios are able to make more realistic films that viewers are likely to not only be visually and audibly impressed by, but are also able to relate to on more basic levels because the film as a whole was created to be as naturally realistic as possible. Natural realism, although not always sought by movie-goers, is something that all humans are capable of relating to and can find some interest in, proving foreign films are not a waste of time.