Justine Smith's 100 Films To Watch To Expand Your Horizons

An Austrian officer sets out to seduce a neglected young wife.

A story about a family torn apart by a worker's strike. At first, the mother wants to protect her family from the troublemakers, but eventually she realizes that her son is right and the workers should strike.

A married couple have a small apartment in Moscow. When an old friend of the husband's arrives in the city, he is unable to find lodgings. Kolia, the husband, invites his friend to move in with them.

After falling in love with a courtesan, Rikiya is blinded by ash during a fight in a brothel. Believing the blindness permanent and his opponent dead, Rikiya goes back home to his sister. Okiku, desperate to protect her brother who thinks himself a murderer, wants to sacrifice herself for him and become a prostitute to pay for Rikiya's treatment.

A sharecropper decides to become a preacher after falling for a vamp from the city.

Three castaways - a man and two women - adrift in the vast expanse of the ocean find solace in recounting the tales of their lives to one another, reminiscing about the circumstances that led them to their desolate predicament.

The lives of two slum neighbors, one of a happy-go-lucky gambler and the other of a poor ronin, converge when the two get involved with the affairs of a powerful samurai official and his gangsters.

In Xochimilco 1909, María Candelaria and Lorenzo Rafael long for getting married but the odds are against them. María Candelaria is segregated for being a prostitute's child and the couple faces the greed of Mr. Damian, the town's shop owner who secretly desires María. When María falls sick with Malaria, Lorenzo Rafael steals a quinine bottle from Damian's shop, unleashing tragedy for the lovers.

A lonely housewife finds her monotonous life altered when her childhood sweetheart returns to town.

In the hope of earning enough money to pay off his debts and save his land, a poor farmer becomes a rickshaw puller in Calcutta and faces many difficulties.

Caught up in an all-consuming whirlwind romance with a local heartthrob, Stella, a fiercely proud Rebetiko diva, resists surrender. But everything points to a tragic ending. And in the aftermath of passion, there can be no winners.

A group of railroad workers decide to make extra money by smuggling forbidden goods and engaging in other criminal activities.

In this melodrama, a poverty-stricken woman raises her sons through many trials and tribulations. But no matter the struggles, she always sticks to her own moral code.

Yuko is sent to the coastal regions to be raised away from the rest of her sophisticated family where she finds out from her ill grandmother that she is actually the love child of her wealthy businessman father and his ex-secretary.

Out of the blue, a meek, old painter begins receiving love letters from Rosaura. This intrigues his fellow boarding house tenants, so they involve themselves into his relationship until one day the mysterious Rosaura appears.

A newspaper salesman at the train station in Cairo develops an unhealthy obsession with a woman who sells refreshments.

Suresh Sinha, a famous director, discovers star potential in Shanti, a woman he stumbled into one rainy evening, and casts her as the lead in a film. In a twist of fate, Shanti becomes a superstar and Suresh faces a decline in his career.

"Araya" is an old natural salt mine located in a peninsula in northeastern Venezuela which was still, by 1959, being exploited manually five hundred years after its discovery by the Spanish. Margot Benacerraf captures in images, the life of the "salineros" and their archaic methods of work before their definite disappearance with the arrival of the industrial exploitation.

This compelling tale of love and betrayal, set in the upper Egyptian countryside, follows the story of Amna as she plots her revenge on the engineer who destroyed her family's honor.

A selfless young woman (Supriya Choudhury) sacrifices her own happiness for her unappreciative family.

A 16th century prince falls in love with a court dancer and battles with his emperor father.

A simple yet devout Christian makes a vow to Saint Barbara after she saves his donkey, but everyone he meets seems determined to misunderstand his intentions. Will he be able to keep his promise in the end?

Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness", of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.

A poor family in the Northeast of Brazil (Fabiano, the father; Sinhá Vitória, the mother; their 2 children and a dog called Baleia) wander about the barren land searching for a better place to live, with food and work. But the drought and misery destroy their hopes.

Life at home changes when a house-wife from a middle-class, conservative family in Calcutta gets a job as a saleswoman.