List of Academy Award winners and nominees for Best International Feature Film



The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film (formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film prior to 2020) is handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to a feature-length motion picture produced outside the United States of America with a predominantly non-English dialogue track.

When the first Academy Awards ceremony was held on May 16, 1929, to honor films released in 1927–28, there was no separate category for foreign language films. Between 1947 and 1955, the Academy presented Special/Honorary Awards to the best foreign language films released in the United States. These awards, however, were not handed out on a regular basis (no award was given in 1953), and were not competitive since there were no nominees but simply one winning film per year. For the 1956 Academy Awards, a competitive Academy Award of Merit, known as the Best Foreign Language Film Award, was created for non-English speaking films, and has been given annually since then.

Unlike other Academy Awards, the Best International Feature Film Award is not presented to a specific individual. It is accepted by the winning film's director, but is considered an award for the submitting country as a whole. , the Academy changed its rules so that the name of the director is etched onto the Oscar statuette, in addition to the film's country. The director also gets to keep the statuette.

Over the years, the Best International Feature Film and its predecessors have been given almost exclusively to European films: out of the 74 awards handed out by the Academy since 1947 to foreign language films, fifty-seven have gone to European films, nine to Asian films, five to films from the Americas and three to African films. The late Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini directed four winning motion pictures during his lifetime, more than any other director. If Special Awards are taken into account, then Fellini's record is tied by his countryman Vittorio De Sica. The Soviet epic War and Peace (1966–67), for its part, is the longest motion picture to have won the Best Foreign Language Film Award. Filmed from 1962 to 1966, it ran for more than seven hours.

Winners and nominees
In the following table, the years are listed as per Academy convention, and generally correspond to the year of film release; the ceremonies are always held the following year. Films in bold and dark blue background have received an Academy Award; winning films from 1947 to 1955 won a Special/Honorary Award as denoted in the key, while all other winning films won a regular Academy Award of Merit. Films that are neither highlighted nor in bold are the nominees. When sorted chronologically, the table always lists the winning film first and then the four other nominees.

The Submitting country column indicates the country that officially submitted the film to the Academy, and is not necessarily indicative of the film's main country of production. The original titles of the films are also mentioned, as well as the names of the directors and the languages used in the dialogue track, even though none of these elements is officially included in the nomination.

When several languages are used in a film, the predominant one is always listed first; the names of the other languages are written in smaller typesize and placed between brackets. When a film's original title is in a language that uses a non-Latin script, it is first transliterated into the Latin alphabet and then written in its original script.

Films from the former Yugoslavia are written in both Latin and Cyrillic due to the fact that the previously official Serbo-Croatian language used both alphabets. Chinese film titles are romanized according to the pinyin system, and are written using the characters employed in their submitting country, i.e. traditional Chinese ones for films submitted by Hong Kong and Taiwan, and simplified Chinese ones for films submitted by the People's Republic of China.

Multiple wins
Six directors have won the award more than once.

Shortlisted finalists (not nominated)
Since the 79th Academy Awards (2006), a nine-film shortlist has been announced before the nominations, which then has been reduced to the five official nominees. The shortlist was expanded from nine to ten at the 92nd Academy Awards (2019), and from ten to fifteen at the 93rd Academy Awards (2020).