The first foreign language movie to win an Oscar
It’s always something of a remarkable feat when a foreign language movie takes the plaudits at the yearly Academy Awards ceremony, competing against the several works that come out of Hollywood and other English-language-speaking parts of the world.
When Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite won the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar at the 92nd Academy Award ceremony, it became the first foreign language movie to be awarded such a distinction. But how about the first-ever foreign language film to win an Oscar of any kind? To find out the answer, one must go back someway into the history books.
A separate category for foreign language films at the Academy Awards has existed since the ceremony of 1956, even though such works are eligible for consideration as winners of other prizes, including ‘Best Picture’, so long as they have been released in Los Angeles County in California.
Regarding the first nomination for a foreign language film for an Academy Award, that distinction goes to the 1931 French musical film Freedom Forever, also known as Freedom for Us. It was directed by Rene Clair and featured a score by Georges Auric, with the film having more music than any of Clair’s previous works.
It was the use of sound in Freedom Forever that drew acclaim, and the film is sometimes called Clair’s “crowning achievement”. However, the film did not win, so the wait went on for the first foreign language movie to finally take home one of the most coveted awards in the cinema industry.
The day finally arrived at the 18th Academy Awards ceremony in 1945, with the first foreign language film to be nominated for an Oscar is the German-language Swiss film Marie-Louise, which was directed by Leopold Lindtberg and Franz Schnyder, although the latter was uncredited.
The film won the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’, given to the screenwriter Richard Schweizer, forever etching the Swiss artist’s name into the history books and the cinematic annals. Schweizer followed up on his initial success with a further Academy Award for ‘Best Story’ for 1948’s The Search.
Narratively, Marie-Louise tells of the Nazi invasion of France in 1942, when a young girl is taken from the European country to neighbouring Switzerland but is evidently in the throes of the traumatic occurrences she witnessed back home. The film is simply a piece of history in more ways than one.
