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50 free World Cinema trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Hollywood makes a fraction of the films the world watches. The thriller that swept the 2020 Oscars came from Seoul, the most prolific film industry after India's runs on home video out of Lagos, and the oldest film festival on Earth sits on a lagoon in the Adriatic. Knowing your way around that map is the mark of a real movie buff. These 50 questions range from South Korean thrillers and Japanese classics to Indian epics, African firsts, Latin American breakouts, European new waves and the prizes that crown them: the Palme d'Or, the Golden Bear and the foreign-language Oscar. Each answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds a fact worth repeating. Play it to test your festival-circuit credentials, or print it for a film-club night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 2019 film was the first since Marty, over 60 years earlier, to win both the Palme d'Or and Best Picture?
Parasite
Parasite was the first South Korean film to receive any Academy Award recognition. Its Palme d'Or also came on a unanimous jury vote, the first since Blue Is the Warmest Colour in 2013.
Q 02Which 2001 Jean-Pierre Jeunet film has a shy young Parisian secretly engineer small joys for the people around her?
Amélie
Amélie's workplace, the Café des 2 Moulins at 15 Rue Lepic, is a real café. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant wrote Audrey Tautou's heroine as a whimsical portrait of Parisian life.
Q 03Which Guillermo del Toro fantasy has a girl named Ofelia meet a faun in Francoist Spain in summer 1944?
Pan's Labyrinth
Pan's Labyrinth's faun is not Pan, del Toro has insisted; the Spanish title El laberinto del fauno names the fauns of Roman myth. The film won three Oscars and three BAFTAs.
Q 04Which 2002 Brazilian film, cast largely with real favela residents, charts gang wars in a Rio housing project?
City of God
City of God earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Fernando Meirelles. Most of its actors were residents of favelas such as Vidigal and Cidade de Deus itself.
Q 05Which brothers gave their first paid public film screening at Paris's Grand Café in December 1895?
Lumière
The Lumière brothers were beaten to a paying audience by Berlin's Skladanowsky brothers, whose Bioscop shows ran through November 1895. The Paris debut drew around 40 paying visitors.
Q 06Which country has won the Oscar for non-English-language films fourteen times, more than any other as of 2026?
Italy
Italy's fourteen wins include three special awards from before the competitive category existed. As of 2026, France trails with twelve wins but leads on nominations with 41.
Q 07Who became the first performer to win an acting Oscar for a non-English-language role, in De Sica's Two Women?
Sophia Loren
Sophia Loren holds the record of seven David di Donatello Best Actress prizes. Two Women cast her as a mother shielding her twelve-year-old daughter in war-torn Italy.
Q 08Which Park Chan-wook thriller frees a man after fifteen years' captivity and has him eat a live octopus?
Oldboy
Oldboy's octopus was real, and four were eaten during filming; Park later said he felt sorrier for the octopuses than for star Choi Min-sik. It won the 2004 Cannes Grand Prix under jury president Quentin Tarantino.
Q 09Which monochrome Alfonso Cuarón film, named for a Mexico City neighbourhood, follows a live-in maid called Cleo?
Roma
Roma made Cuarón the first person to win Best Director and Best Cinematography for the same film on one night. It was also the first Mexican entry to win Best Foreign Language Film.
Q 10Which 1988 Sicilian-set film ends with a reel of all the kisses a village priest had cut from its screenings?
Cinema Paradiso
Cinema Paradiso began the partnership between director Giuseppe Tornatore and composer Ennio Morricone that lasted until Morricone's death in 2020. It won both the foreign-language Oscar and the Cannes Grand Prix.
Q 11Which Vittorio De Sica film follows Antonio Ricci and his son Bruno through a desperate post-war search?
Bicycle Thieves
Bicycle Thieves received an honorary Oscar as the most outstanding foreign-language film, years before a competitive category existed. Lamberto Maggiorani played the desperate father and Enzo Staiola his son.
Q 12Which Italian film, whose bookshop-owner hero turns a concentration camp into a game for his son, won three Oscars?
Life Is Beautiful
Life Is Beautiful's three Oscars were Best Actor for Roberto Benigni, Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Dramatic Score. It also won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998.
Q 13What name, traced to a 2002 New York Times article, is given to Nigeria's prolific home-video film industry?
Q 21Which New Zealand director became the first woman to win the Palme d'Or, for The Piano in 1993?
Jane Campion
Jane Campion was also the first filmmaker from New Zealand to take the prize. The Piano premiered at Cannes on 15 May 1993 as an Australian, New Zealand and French co-production.
Q 22Which 2023 Justine Triet courtroom drama won the Palme d'Or and then the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay?
Anatomy of a Fall
Anatomy of a Fall also won Cannes's Palm Dog award for the family pet Snoop, companion of the visually impaired son Daniel. It earned five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.
Q 23Which 2011 French comedy-drama about a quadriplegic and his carer was inspired by the life of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo?
Nollywood
Nollywood's boom is usually dated from Living in Bondage, a 1992 Igbo-language film released direct to video. Most Igbo filmmakers nonetheless prefer to shoot in English.
Q 14Which Telugu epic by S. S. Rajamouli won India's first feature-film Oscar, for the song 'Naatu Naatu'?
RRR
RRR's 'Naatu Naatu' was the first song from an Asian film to win Best Original Song. The film was also the first Indian release in the Dolby Cinema format.
Q 15Which film festival, founded in August 1932 as part of an art biennale, is the world's oldest?
Venice
Venice was founded by Giuseppe Volpi, a member of the National Fascist Party, within the Venice Biennale. It forms the 'Big Three' of European festivals with Cannes and Berlin.
Q 16What term did a Spanish journalist coin in 1966 for Italian-made cowboy films often shot in the Tabernas Desert?
Spaghetti Western
Spaghetti Western was coined by journalist Alfonso Sánchez Martínez, and the films' Spanish locations doubled for the American Southwest and northern Mexico.
Q 17Which French magician turned filmmaker landed a capsule in the Moon's eye in 1902's A Trip to the Moon?
Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès's film fell into obscurity after he quit the industry and was rediscovered around 1930, when devotees began to recognise his importance. He played the lead, Professor Barbenfouillis, himself.
Q 18Which Spanish director won Oscars for All About My Mother and then for the screenplay of Talk to Her?
Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother has received more awards than any other film in Spanish cinema, including the Golden Globe and BAFTAs. Talk to Her also earned him a Best Director nomination.
Q 19Which 2016 South Korean hit strands a workaholic father and his daughter on a KTX service during a zombie outbreak?
Train to Busan
Train to Busan was the first Korean film of 2016 to pass 10 million admissions, and it grossed $98.5 million on an $8.5 million budget. It premiered in the Midnight Screenings at Cannes.
Q 20Which 1998 Tom Tykwer film gives its heroine twenty minutes to find 100,000 marks and save her boyfriend Manni?
Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run restarts its events from the moment Lola leaves the house, replaying the chase with different outcomes. Germany submitted it for the foreign-language Oscar, but it was not nominated.
The Intouchables
The Intouchables's real carer, Abdel Sellou, is French-Algerian, and the directors found the pair in a documentary. Five percent of the profits went to a charity for paralysed people.
Q 24Which 2011 Indonesian action film by Welsh director Gareth Evans traps police inside a Jakarta crime lord's block?
The Raid
The Raid was retitled The Raid: Redemption in the US because Sony Pictures Classics could not secure the rights to the plain title. Its fights showcase the Indonesian martial art pencak silat.
Q 25Which 1998 Hideo Nakata film about a videotape whose viewers die seven days later became Japan's top-grossing horror?
Ringu
Ringu out-grossed The Matrix in Hong Kong in 1999 and became that city's highest-grossing Japanese-language film. A North American remake followed in 2002.
Q 26Which Bong Joon-ho film unleashes a creature from Seoul's Han River on a family that runs a riverside snack stand?
The Host
The Host was sparked by a real 2000 incident in which a US military base worker had formaldehyde poured down a drain into the Han River. Wētā Workshop modelled the creature.
Q 27Which 2002 Hong Kong thriller did Martin Scorsese remake as the Best Picture winner The Departed?
Infernal Affairs
Infernal Affairs's remake brought Martin Scorsese his first and only Best Director Oscar. Brad Pitt's company Plan B bought the remake rights in 2003.
Q 28Which director of Raise the Red Lantern staged the opening ceremonies of both the 2008 and 2022 Beijing Olympics?
Zhang Yimou
Zhang Yimou won a Peabody Award for the 2008 ceremony's 'cast of thousands'. He co-directed it with the choreographer Zhang Jigang.
Q 29Which 1993 Chen Kaige film about two Peking opera stars was the first Chinese-language winner of the Palme d'Or?
Farewell My Concubine
Farewell My Concubine was pulled from Chinese cinemas two weeks after its Shanghai premiere; officials relented in September, partly fearing the ban would hurt Beijing's 2000 Olympic bid.
Q 30Which 2018 Hirokazu Kore-eda drama about a makeshift family surviving on petty theft won the Palme d'Or?
Shoplifters
Shoplifters grew from news reports on poverty and shoplifting in Japan, and Kore-eda edited the film himself. It was the first Japanese Palme d'Or winner since The Eel in 1997.