The success of Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or-winner and Oscar Best Picture nominee Anatomy of a Fall (available to rent from various digital platforms) has taught us many things. A steel drum cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” absolutely slaps (it was in the top 5 of my 2023 Spotify Wrapped). A canine performance can be more captivating than several nominated humans this year1 (you’re going to have to subscribe for that footnote, sorry). And, perhaps most importantly, the French court system is absolutely cuckoo bananas.
This is not to say that the American legal machine is a paradigm of dispensing solemn justice, to be clear. But it’s fascinating to plunge headfirst into another nation’s rituals for determining guilt and innocence under the law without taking a remedial civics class. The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky observed “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” Consider the global courtroom drama a prequel to such a judgment.
We can learn so much about a country from watching how they conduct their trials. Consider the layout of the courtroom. The height of the judge’s seat. The distance of the judge’s seat. The number of judges. Where the defendant looks. Where the defendant can be seen. Who can see the defendant. How speaking roles are determined. When deference must be shown to the judge. The position of the jury. The existence of a jury. The list goes on and on.
Here are ten films from a broad international map that unfurl trials worth contemplating not only for their content but also for their format.
🇦🇷 Argentina 1985, Amazon Prime Video
As a fledgling democracy, how do you put a former autocratic regime on trial? Very carefully, as shown in Argentina 1985. This docudrama shows how an experienced jurist (played by legendary Argentine actor Ricardo Darín in an inspired bit of meta casting) leans on a younger generation of attorneys to help litigate for the country they wish to inherit. It’s a rousing tale of holding the bloody junta to account by creating a case that can win over not just the judges but a skeptical country at large still reeling from decades of trauma.
🇮🇳 Court, rental
As seen when “P.I.M.P.” gets litigated in Anatomy of a Fall, culture can be a battleground. That’s especially true in India’s Court as folk singer and activist Narayan Kamble finds himself in the court’s crosshairs when his lyrics appear to have incited a sewage worker to commit suicide. Chaitanya Tamhane’s film makes for gripping drama when it dwells in that grey area trying to connect intent with action. While the case might initially appear to concern only two men, the lens begins to widen and encompass the nation at large.
🇮🇱 Gett, The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, Amazon Prime Video
The entirety of Gett’s two-hour runtime takes place inside an Israeli courtroom where the titular character lobbies a rabbinical court to receive a divorce. It’s a fiercely feminist tale providing a damning verdict on how women are degraded and disrespected in Israeli society. Hearing such sexist remarks as “Know your place, woman” is painful enough, but the late actress Ronit Elkabetz (who also co-wrote and directed the film) usually maintains a stoic facade and rarely breaks it. Her outbreaks, forcefully and urgently argued, feel rousing and righteous as a result.
🇱🇧 The Insult, Tubi (free with ads)
It started out with a diss, how did it end up like this? There’s little bright side for either aggrieved party in the Lebanese legal drama The Insult, which spirals out from a single dispute between a Palestinian refugee and a local Christian. It’s precisely the spark that lights a tinderbox of unrest between various ethnic factions in the Middle Eastern state, so much so that it starts to subsume the result of the actual trial. Something about this story of two men representing opposing camps locked in a bitter and seemingly intractable dispute that only escalates with more attention feels particularly relevant at the moment!
🇯🇴 Inshallah A Boy, in theaters
A recent release worth having on your radar, whether that’s at a local theater near you or during its eventual streaming release. (I’ll try my best to highlight here when that might be.) Inshallah a Boy finds a riveting morality play in the recently widowed Nawal’s entanglement with the Jordanian court system. Her late husband’s stingy brothers insinuate they’ll take back the property she and her daughter the official legal documentation to inherit. But that equation changes if Nawal managed to produce a male heir, and it just so happens that her work brings her in contact with a woman interested in terminating the unwanted pregnancy generated by a husband she wishes were dead…
🇦🇺 The Last Wave, Max/Criterion Channel
“We're nothing but the law we learn from our forefathers,” a young Aboriginal tells a buttoned-up white lawyer in The Last Wave. Unlike most of the movies listed here, this legal drama is less focused on the courtroom proceedings — which is a fascinating case of apparent ritual murder — and more on the very function of law itself as encoding generations of power and control. Australian New Wave standard-bearer Peter Weir renders a naive solicitor’s journey of political awakening as more of a psychological thriller, showing the dangerous ends of a system perpetuated by his ancestors.
🇵🇱 Leave No Traces, Freevee (free with ads via Amazon Prime Video)
If you are down to get in the weeds with a historical drama that cares about the nuts-and-bolts of justice in a regime of martial law, have I got a movie for you! The 160 minutes of Leave No Traces are extremely specific to one case involving the state-sanctioned murder of a student in 1983. You feel the length, sure, but you feel the deliberateness of Jan P. Matuszynski’s vision to look unflinchingly back at a shameful episode in the country’s oppressive history. The court becomes just one of many arenas used to silence, intimidate, and discredit the lone witness of the crime. The film is admirably local, never trying to cheat out to explain itself or extrapolate its themes.
🇯🇵 Rashomon, Max/Criterion Channel
Yes, Rashomon is a courtroom drama! Akira Kurosawa’s seminal drama about how three witnesses to the murder of a samurai quite literally gives its name to a commonly used term in the legal community to describe the often contradictory nature of testimony. Anatomy of a Fall is but the latest film to understand something that Rashomon was among the first films to highlight: the legal system is where societies go to synthesize competing visions of reality and attempt to emerge with one objective “truth” victorious. Triet, like Kurosawa, calls BS. “It’s the place where fiction actually begins and overtakes truth,” she told me in our interview last year.
🇫🇷 Saint Omer, Hulu
Will I ever stop imploring people to watch Saint Omer, yet another masterful look inside France’s legal system? Probably not. In case what I said when ranking it in my top 10 of 2022 wasn’t enough, I’ll let filmmaker Alice Diop make the case for why her film is so important. Here’s what she told me about fictionalizing the trial of a modern day Medea in our interview:
“I don’t understand this woman because I didn’t understand her at the trial, and I still don’t understand her now. And because I don’t understand her, that makes me ask questions about myself. That’s what I offer to the viewer—to ask him or herself questions. Yes, of course, true crime is a popular genre in France. My approach was specifically not to follow in that genre. The reason this true crime, this incident, interested me was much more than the crime. It’s because it allowed me to bring up all these other issues that range from mythology to tragedy to a collective portrait of a society.”
🇮🇷 A Separation, rental
Possibly the best movie on this entire list and one that will absolutely stand the test of time, no matter what legal system is in place in Iran when a viewer encounters it. Asghar Farhadi is our best dramaturgical filmmaker working today, and A Separation really crystallizes his mastery of how many layers of secrecy and shame underline all human behavior. In A Separation, divorce proceedings provide the inciting incident and backdrop for a family buckling under the pressures of their society’s customs. While the struggles of this plot are specific to Iran, they are so achingly human and wholly recognizable to anyone. I wish there were some way to force anyone who feels the need to demagogue this country’s politics to watch this movie.
While I talked to Farhadi for a different film, I think this final dialogue exchange between us captures what makes his films so uniquely insightful into the human condition:
“I want to ask you the question that I always find myself asking after your films because maybe you have more insight into it than I do: Why do people lie?
Maybe the better question to ask is: What happens when people tell the truth? Because sometimes I feel like in a society, telling the truth is more expensive than telling a lie. It depends on the environment that we’re living in.”
Happy Valentine’s Day! Paid subscribers got a fun, detailed exploration of 50 movies that explain the boom and bust of the American rom-com from 1989-2009.
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