Foreign Films: One of My Favorite Ways to Learn About The World

Every September, back when I was running my company, I would take a week and a half off work and disappear into the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). TIFF always starts on the first Thursday of September and ends on the second Sunday — a ten-day marathon of stories from around the world. It became a ritual for me. A reset. A quiet celebration. And eventually, one of my favourite ways to learn about the world — through foreign films.

When I first started attending TIFF, I’d dabble — a foreign film here, a foreign film there. But over the years, something shifted. Each time I logged in to book my tickets, I noticed my selections tilting more and more toward international cinema. At some point, almost without realizing it, foreign films became the majority of what I watched.

And since I’m no polyglot, the more subtitles, the better.

One of the best festivals I ever experienced was 2023, when Hollywood was shut down by the writers’ and actors’ strikes. Most people were disappointed — no red carpets, no studio premieres, no celebrity appearances. But I felt like a kid in a candy store. Cameron Bailey and the TIFF programming team scrambled to fill the lineup with films from around the world, and it became the most foreign-film-heavy TIFF I’ve ever attended. I didn’t miss the celebrity culture for a second.

Watching three films a day for ten days is a kind of immersion. Some people perform sentiment analysis by feeding thousands of tweets into a model to understand how a culture is thinking. For me, watching foreign films back-to-back at TIFF does something similar. You begin to feel the emotional pulse of the world that year — its anxieties, its humour, its moral struggles, its family dynamics, its dreams, and its disillusionments.

It’s like taking a trip around the world without leaving Toronto.

One thing that fascinates me about foreign cinema is the sheer determination required to make it. Directors often spend years fighting for budgets, negotiating censorship, or pushing through political resistance just to get their story out into the world. And there’s a strange paradox I’ve noticed: the more repressed or culturally constrained a society is, the more explosive and daring its films often become.

Two cultures that immediately come to mind are Iran and South Korea.

Iranian Cinema

Despite heavy artistic restrictions, Iranian filmmakers routinely produce some of the most emotionally rich and morally sophisticated films in global cinema. What makes Iranian cinema so compelling is its restraint — meaning is often conveyed through implication rather than declaration, through silence rather than spectacle.

A Hero (2021) — Directed by Asghar Farhadi

The film explores truth, reputation, and moral ambiguity with remarkable subtlety. Small decisions carry enormous weight, and the story unfolds in shades of grey rather than clear victories or villains — a hallmark of Iranian storytelling. It’s a powerful example of how creativity finds a way to surface even under pressure.

Korean Cinema

Korean cinema is equally remarkable, though its intensity expresses itself differently. Born from a conservative society navigating rapid economic growth, social stratification, and enormous performance pressure, Korean films often feel tightly wound — precise, urgent, and emotionally charged.

Parasite (2019) — Directed by Bong Joon-ho

The film blends dark humour, class tension, and suspense with surgical control, revealing how inequality quietly shapes daily life. It’s both entertaining and unsettling — and emblematic of a broader Korean cinematic tradition that isn’t afraid to interrogate power, status, and survival. As with Iranian cinema, Parasite is just one entry point into a much deeper body of work.

Over time, as I watched more films from more countries, I realized that at the heart of every great story — regardless of culture — is the same structure. Years ago, I read The Writer’s Journey, which simplifies Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s book is brilliant but dense; Vogler’s version makes the ideas more accessible.

When you strip away setting, language, genre, and style, every hero / character arc story reduces to a simple architecture:

A protagonist
A challenge
An internal struggle
A transformation
A return

Two films in particular capture this beautifully — and they remain two of my favourite foreign films of all time.

The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)

Directed by Juan José Campanella

Set against the backdrop of a decades-old unresolved murder, the film follows a retired Argentine legal investigator as he revisits a case that never truly left him. Beneath the mystery lies a much quieter story about regret, restraint, and unrealized love.

The protagonist, played by Ricardo Darín, begins the story somewhat timid — professionally, romantically, morally. He writes a letter that begins with the words “I fear” (tengo miedo) and, in a single moment of courage, changes one letter so it becomes “I love” (te amo). That tiny shift represents the entire character arc. He becomes someone new — not because the world changes, but because he does.

The Lives of Others (2006)

Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Set in East Berlin during the Cold War, the film centers on a Stasi officer tasked with surveilling a playwright and his partner, immersing the viewer in a world of constant observation, suspicion, and quiet control.

Over time, the officer slowly transforms from a dutiful instrument of the state into an empathetic protector of the very people he is assigned to watch. Through exposure to art, intimacy, and moral consequence, he regains his humanity. It’s one of the greatest portraits of internal change I’ve ever seen.

What Foreign Films Have Taught Me

And that, ultimately, is what foreign films have taught me: while cultures differ wildly in how they express emotion, humour, family, hierarchy, or conflict, the underlying human journey is the same everywhere. We are all wrestling with fear, courage, love, desire, identity, and meaning — just in different languages.

By no means am I a film buff or a critic. I simply love learning through immersion, and foreign films offer a remarkable window into the inner life of a culture. They’re not a substitute for travel, food (such as places like San Sebastian), or meeting people from that culture — those are still the best ways to understand the world. But foreign films come surprisingly close.

After watching many foreign films, they remain one of my favourite ways to learn — about others, about the world, and sometimes about myself.

Elsewhere, I’ve written about other formative chapters, including the process of selling my company.

To read more of my writing, visit my writing page.