What I Did with My Summer Vacation, and Why I’m Not Embarrassed

It’s a new semester, and the World Englishes Committee is back in full swing. We are excited to get back to our usual business with projects and events and more!

A shot from Luis Buñuel’s 1930 French film L’Age d’Or (“The Golden Age“).

To kick off this academic year, I wanted to share one of the ways I spent my summer. Since I was not blogging for this site, I must have been doing something else that was productive, right? Well, for some people, watching a lot of international films may not exactly be perceived as productive, but for me, stuck at home much of the time, folding a lot of laundry during the evening and so on, it made my summer pass in ways that were enlightening and satisfying in ways that writing articles (I did that too, all right?) is not. Over and over, I was finding cinematic treasures that presented beautiful cinematography and compelling story-telling that made me laugh, cry, and wonder and ultimately left me in awe and admiration. [Note: By the way, one of the goals I made at the beginning of summer was to not watch a single movie in English, and I did pretty well as the only English-speaking films I ended up watching were The French Connection (1971) and Sharknado (2013).]

So, here is what I am going to do: I am going to share an alphabetical list of international films I have watched since the Spring 2021 Semester ended. I will link to reviews and articles about each one, but I won’t offer any commentary of my own since the list is quite long. Not every film left the same enduring impression on me, but taken overall the experience of spending my summer watching these films was memorable and valuable. I feel that I was indeed very productive.

To cap this post off, I would like to add that BBC Culture conducted a project in which they asked 209 critics from 43 countries about what they considered the greatest examples of international cinema. As a result, BBC Culture eventually generated a top-100 list, which I am using and will continue to use to guide my own forays into international film-watching. I would encourage you to do the same. Enjoy!

~Jeff Howard


Work Cited

“L’Age d’Or.” IMDb, n.d. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1187043/. Image.