Scorsese's Picks

Hector Babenco auditioned 1,300 boys from São Paulo’s favelas for this crushingly real classic of Brazilian cinema, with its flashes of beauty, and chose Fernando Ramos da Silva. Seven years after the premiere police shot him dead, life catching up with cinema as brutally as in “City of God”. — Pixote is a São Paulo street kid until the authorities pick him up and lock him in a reform school where the guards are more dangerous than the boys. He breaks out but doesn’t go home, moving from stealing to worse and worse things. A woman and a few other boys stay at his side, and they’re the only family he has. — Special Jury Prize | Locarno Film Festival | 1981 Honourable Mention | San Sebastian Film Festival | 1981 Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film | Golden Globes | 1982

Its Palme d’Or came in 1975, and half a century later it’s still the only African film ever to win it. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation helped restore all three hours of this epic of Algerian history, in which Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, having lost his actor, played the village madman himself. — Drought drives Ahmed from his village in 1939 Algeria to a town where colonial power is much closer at hand. Then come the French army, a quarry and fifteen years of small humiliations, until the peasant has become a man who has chosen a side. His son is watching. — Palme d'Or | Cannes Film Festival | 1975

In this spare, widely admired classic of African cinema, a young Senegalese woman goes to the French Riviera to look after a French family’s children. Ousmane Sembène had been writing novels until he realised that the people he wrote about couldn’t read them, so he turned to the camera instead. — Diouana is looking for work in a village outside Dakar when a French family takes her on and offers to bring her to Antibes to mind their children. She says yes and goes. Once she arrives, though, it turns out she’s expected to cook and clean, and never to leave the flat. — Best French Film | Jean Vigo Prize | 1966

Nobody before or since has captured the essence of poetry in images quite the way Parajanov did. Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation oversaw the restoration, said that watching it was like opening a door into another dimension. — The poet Sayat-Nova grows up among dyers and their wool in 18th-century Armenia, then sings at court, falls in love with a princess and enters a monastery. None of it is told in scenes. Instead it unfolds in images: pomegranate juice spreading across white cloth, and open books drying on a rooftop as the wind turns their pages.

The Film Foundation sends us on a journey into the depths of Kerala, restoring the mystical film by Aravindan Govindan, who glorified the local tradition of India's southern region, but remained largely unknown outside of his homeland. — A magician called Kummatty comes to entertain a group of village children with dancing, singing and magic tricks. In one such game, he changes the children into animals. One boy, changed into a dog, is chased away and misses the moment when the magician breaks the spell restoring the children to their human form. The dog-boy has to wait until Kummatty returns.

Bahram Beyzaie started out writing for the stage, and rather than lean on an existing myth, he invented his own for this Iranian New Wave film, which was banned at home for decades. A man washes ashore with no memory of who he is, and years later the sea starts asking for him back. — A drifting boat comes ashore with an unconscious man inside, and when he comes round he claims not to remember who he is. He settles in the village and marries a local girl, and for years life is quiet. Then, out of the sea mist, comes someone who has been looking for him.

Few films have had a stranger fate than this one, banned after the revolution and presumed lost until its reels turned up years later in a Tehran junk shop. It’s a period crime drama with a queer story at its edges, where Kubrick and Parajanov share a roof with gothic horror and Persian tradition. — When a wealthy woman dies in her grand house in Tehran, her husband, a corrupt merchant, sets out to get rid of his stepdaughter, who stands to inherit the house. Modern and educated, the young woman is utterly alone among people who would like to see her dead. So she asks a servant for help, and the servant is playing both sides.

Jia Zhangke owed Robert Bresson more than a title, and he shot his debut underground, completely outside the Chinese system. His hero is a pickpocket who watches all his friends get on with their lives and keeps on stealing anyway. — In the Fenyang of 1997, Xiao Wu still makes his living picking pockets, while his old partners have quit the street for business and not one of them has taken him along. He fills his lonely evenings with a hostess from a karaoke bar. Meanwhile the police are waging a campaign against crime across town, and it’s getting harder for a man like him to go unseen. — Wolfgang Staudte Award | Berlin Film Festival | 1998 Netpac Award | Berlin Film Festival | 1998