On the Road

No other film has been nominated for Oscars in animation, documentary and international feature at once. Director Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Amin, an Afghan, met as teenagers in a small Danish town. Years later Amin opens up about his past but won’t show his face, so the whole story is animated. — In present-day Copenhagen, Amin Nawabi, an academic in his thirties who came from Afghanistan, is getting ready to marry his partner. Nobody knows how he really reached Denmark, not even the man he’s about to marry. He agrees to tell an old friend the story of his journey, which begins in Kabul, where a family has to leave its whole world behind. — Nominated for Best International Feature Film | Oscars | 2022 Nominated for Best Documentary | Oscars | 2022 Nominated for Best Animated Feature | Oscars | 2022 Grand Jury Prize | Sundance Film Festival | 2021 Grand Prix Bank Millennium Award | Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival | 2021 Best European Documentary | European Film Awards | 2021 Best European Animated Feature Film | European Film Awards | 2021 Best Film | Annecy Film Festival | 2021

Save this Palme d’Or winner for a day when you can’t see the point of going on. Kiarostami puts a man who has decided to die behind the wheel, and out of his long drive he builds one of the most moving films about what keeps us alive. Afterwards, even cherries taste different. — Mr Badii has decided to kill himself, and all he needs is someone to come at dawn and bury him. So he drives the hills outside Tehran, offering the job to strangers he picks up. A young soldier bolts and a seminarian refuses, but a man who works at the Natural History Museum says yes, for reasons of his own, and then he starts to talk. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1997

Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a girl who refuses to belong to any world, in the film that won Agnès Varda the Golden Lion at Venice. It begins with her body being found and then goes back over her last days, and you won’t be able to take your eyes off her. — A reporter we never see turns the camera on the men who found a girl dead, and asks how she got there. Flashbacks show her drifting among homeless people and immigrant labourers, spending time with a professor who studies trees and with a young woman who envies how completely free she is. She once had an office job, and one day she walked out and kept on going. — Official Selection | Venice Film Festival | 1985 FIPRESCI Prize | Venice Film Festival | 1985 OCIC Award | Venice Film Festival | 1985

In 1994 an elderly man rode a lawnmower nearly 400 kilometres to reach the brother he hadn’t spoken to in years, and Richard Farnsworth was 79 and had cancer when he played him. It’s David Lynch’s strangest film, precisely because it’s so ordinary. — Alvin Straight, of Laurens, Iowa, can barely walk, and no one is about to give him a driving licence. So when he hears that the brother he hasn’t spoken to in years has had a stroke, nearly 400 kilometres away, he starts up his lawnmower. It’s going to be a long ride. — Nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Richard Farnsworth) | Oscars | 2000 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 1999 Screen International Award | European Film Awards | 1999

Panah Panahi, son of Jafar Panahi, won Cannes over with his debut, set in a car where the mother jokes through her tears, the father grumbles from the back seat and the chatty little boy never stops talking. Only the older son drives in silence, without saying where they’re really going. — A six-year-old is the only one in the car having a good time. He bounces around the back seat, where his father lies with a leg in plaster, and gives neither his mother nor his silent older brother a moment’s peace. They’ve been driving across Iran since morning and nobody has told him why, but this is no holiday. — Best Film | London Film Festival | 2021 Nominated for Golden Camera | Cannes Film Festival | 2021 Official Selection - Directors' Fortnight | Cannes Film Festival | 2021

Walter Salles (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) adapts Jack Kerouac’s cult novel through the Beat Generation’s poetry, drugs and jazz, with Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Amy Adams as the young people on the road. The road never ends, and the thrill is not knowing what tomorrow brings. — In the late 1940s, Sal is a young writer who has yet to write anything. Then Dean Moriarty turns up from Denver, an ex-con with a teenage wife, a car and not a cent to his name. Together they set off for the far side of America, fuelled by jazz and drugs, and Sal writes every bit of it down. — Official Selection - International Competition | Cannes Film Festival | 2012

Kiarostami (“Taste of Cherry”) gives an eight-year-old one job, returning a friend’s notebook, and you root for him on a road to the heart of humanity as twisty as a Safdie brothers film. Gentle and sometimes funny, it won the Bronze Leopard at Locarno, and that boy stays with you for a long time. — Their teacher warns Mohammad Reza that if he does his homework anywhere but in his notebook one more time, he’ll be expelled. That same afternoon, at home, Ahmad realises he’s taken his friend’s notebook by mistake. Mohammad Reza lives in the village over the hill, and Ahmad doesn’t even know his address, but he sets off to find him. — FIPRESCI Award - Special Mention | Locarno International Film Festival | 1989 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury - Special Mention | Locarno International Film Festival | 1989 Bronze Leopard | Locarno International Film Festival | 1989

When Iran’s authorities banned Jafar Panahi (“It Was Just an Accident”) from making films for twenty years, he took the wheel of a taxi, kept shooting as he drove around Tehran and won the Golden Bear for it. With every fare, more of Iran and its people come into view, and no censor gets a say. — Tehran rolls past the front seat of a taxi, and everyone climbs in: men and women, young and old, rich and poor, people who live by the old rules and people who have lost patience with them, bootleg video sellers and human rights defenders. The man at the wheel is a very inexperienced driver but a very experienced director, and his name is Jafar Panahi. — Golden Bear | Berlin International Film Festival | 2015 FIPRESCI Prize | Berlin International Film Festival | 2015

Fatih Akin pays tribute to teenage nerve with this tale of two boys who steal a car and set off on a mad trip across Germany, with no map and nowhere to be. It’s a moving story of a friendship that saves a life, and of a summer that turns out to be the best ever precisely because nobody planned it. — A fourteen-year-old boy is spending the summer alone in the family villa, since his mother is in rehab and his father is away on a supposed business trip with his secretary. When another boy drifts into his life, they’re soon friends, and before long they’ve stolen a car and taken off. Where they’re going hardly matters, as long as it’s away from Berlin.

A silent man walks out of the Texas desert in search of his wife in the cult road movie that Wim Wenders began shooting with only half a script, and which went on to win the Palme d’Or. It’s a portrait of a lonely America, where Nastassja Kinski in a pink sweater stands for something we’ve all lost. — Silent and apparently without a memory, a man wanders through Texas in punishing heat until he is found unconscious in the desert. His brother, who gave him up for dead years ago, takes him home to the boy he and his wife have been raising, the man’s own son. He won’t say where he has been all this time, and all he wants is to find his wife and take the boy with him. — FIPRESCI Prize | Cannes Film Festival | 1984 Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1984 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 1984

Nobody films today’s Europe like Radu Jude, who is both provocateur and scholar. He borrowed his title from Stanisław Jerzy Lec and cut a Romanian classic into the film to deliver a merciless takedown of modern consumerism, a world where old cinema and TikTok go arm in arm. — Angela, a production assistant in present-day Bucharest, has been up since four in the morning. A corporation has ordered a film about safety at work, and she spends the whole day driving around the city to film auditions with workers who were injured on the job and are supposed to tell their own stories. The company, though, has its own ideas about how those stories should go. — Special Jury Prize | Locarno Film Festival | 2023

Gabriel Mascaro won a Silver Bear in Berlin for this tale of a 77-year-old, played by Denise Weinberg, who refuses to let the state ship her off to a closed colony for the elderly. It’s science fiction without the chill, mischievous and full of sun, with a fish fight you won’t forget. — In a near-future Brazil, the state sends its old people to a colony deep in the interior, and nobody ever comes back. The age limit has just been lowered, and now it covers Tereza. Rather than wait, she boards a boat and heads upriver, where someone offers her the slime of a rare snail that is said to show you your own future. — Grand Jury Prize | Berlin International Film Festival | 2025 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Berlin International Film Festival | 2025 Berliner Morgenpost Readers' Jury Award | Berlin International Film Festival | 2025 Official Selection | Sydney Film Festival | 2025

Sweden’s answer to Forrest Gump is a hundred years old and loves blowing things up. Allan Karlsson has no opinions at all, yet he has spent his life nudging history by accident, meeting Franco, Stalin and Truman. Robert Gustafsson was aged so convincingly that the makeup was nominated for an Oscar. — It’s Allan Karlsson’s hundredth birthday in Malmköping, where he landed in a care home after blowing up the fox that killed his cat. Rather than turn up to his party, he climbs out of the window and escapes. At the bus station a young man asks him to watch his suitcase, but the bus arrives first, so the suitcase leaves with the centenarian, and it’s full of gang money. — Nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling | Oscars | 2016 Nominated for Best European Film | Goya Awards | 2015

Wim Wenders produced this debut by Polish director Michał Chmielewski, a Polish-American road movie in which the journey is the point. Loosely inspired by the 1970s disappearance of artist Connie Converse, it puts the luminous Lena Góra behind the wheel and glorious California outside the window. — Sara is thrown out in her evening dress, and by morning nobody has let her back in. With nowhere to go, she spots a car with the keys in the ignition and the engine running, and she takes it. Inside is a CD of songs recorded for a woman called Mimi. She plays them over and over, and keeps driving.

Hilmar Oddsson shot this road comedy in black and white, though its humour is pitch black, with a dead mother riding in the back and a very much alive dog up front. Behind the laughter, the grief and the graveyard jokes, this one-man funeral procession carries something more. — It’s 1980, and Jón has spent his whole life in his mother’s house in Iceland, with her telling him how to do everything. Before she died she left one last instruction: she is to be laid to rest on the south coast, at the other end of the island. So Jón props his mother up on the back seat of the car, settles the dog beside him and sets off.

Sean Penn saw “Il Divo” and asked to work with Sorrentino, who wrote him the part of a retired rock star made up like Robert Smith of The Cure. David Byrne plays on stage, and the rocker’s hunt for the SS man who tortured his father turns out to be less about revenge than about growing up very late. — Cheyenne is a retired rock star who still does his eyes the way he did when he was young, and for twenty years he has done almost nothing but sit at home in Dublin. When his father dies in New York, Cheyenne reads through his diaries and starts thinking about the SS man who tortured his father in Auschwitz. That man is still alive, somewhere in America. — Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Cannes Film Festival | 2011

Walter Salles (“I’m Still Here”) won the Golden Bear and a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar, turning the world’s eyes to Brazilian cinema. A bitter retiree who wants only peace and quiet is landed with a child, and the grumpy old woman and the bright boy set off across Brazil. — In the main hall of Rio de Janeiro’s central station, Dora, a retired teacher, sets up her table and writes letters, for a fee, for people who can’t write their own. One day a woman dictates a letter to her young son’s father, and moments later she is killed by a bus. The boy is left alone, and Dora reluctantly sets off with him to find his father. — Nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Fernanda Montenegro) | Oscars | 1999 Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film | Oscars | 1999 Golden Bear | Berlin International Film Festival | 1998 Best Actress (Fernanda Montenegro) | Berlin International Film Festival | 1998 Prize of the Ecumenical Jury | Berlin International Film Festival | 1998 Best Film Not in the English Language | BAFTA | 1999 Best Non-English Language Film | Golden Globes | 1999 Audience Award | San Sebastián International Film Festival | 1998 Golden Frog | CAMERIMAGE Film Festival | 1998

Before Nolan took on “The Odyssey”, it inspired the Coen brothers, who hadn’t even read it. George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson are convicts who escape a Mississippi chain gang to find treasure, and their road, like Odysseus’s, has sirens, a one-eyed Bible salesman and plenty of song. — Everett has promised his two fellow convicts a fortune buried in a valley that will be under water in four days, so in the summer of 1937 the three of them walk away from a Mississippi prison gang still in their chains. On the road they meet eccentrics, demagogues and musicians. They even stop at a radio station to sing for money. — Nomination for Best Cinematography | Oscars | 2001 Nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay | Oscars | 2001 Best Actor (George Clooney) | Golden Globes | 2001 Official Selection | Cannes Film Festival | 2000