World Cinema Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
48 free World Cinema trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 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 48 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 48 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's semi-basement flat and its whole street were built on a set, partly so the flood scenes could be shot.
Q 02Which 2001 Jean-Pierre Jeunet film has a shy young Parisian secretly engineer small joys for the people around her?
Amélie
Amélie was turned away by Cannes after festival chief Gilles Jacob found it uninteresting, and the snub stirred a minor controversy once audiences made it a hit.
Q 03Which Guillermo del Toro fantasy has a girl named Ofelia meet a faun in Francoist Spain in 1944?
Pan's Labyrinth
Pan's Labyrinth is El laberinto del fauno in Spanish, naming a faun of Roman myth rather than the god Pan, and it went on to win three Oscars.
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 wasn't nominated for the foreign-language Oscar as Brazil's entry, then a year later earned four nominations, including Best Director for Fernando Meirelles.
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 had run through November 1895.
Q 06Which Ingmar Bergman film has a knight returning from the Crusades play chess with Death?
The Seventh Seal
The Seventh Seal's chess game with Death came from Albertus Pictor's medieval church murals, which Bergman studied while his pastor father preached.
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 was first cast as the daughter, with Anna Magnani as her mother, but after Magnani left the film Loren played the mother instead.
Q 08Which Park Chan-wook thriller frees a man after fifteen years' captivity and has him eat a live octopus?
Oldboy
Oldboy's octopus scene was real: Choi Min-sik went through four live octopuses during filming, and the film won the 2004 Cannes Grand Prix.
Q 09Which monochrome Alfonso Cuarón film, named for a Mexico City neighbourhood, follows a live-in maid called Cleo?
Roma
Roma's Cleo was played by Yalitza Aparicio, a trainee preschool teacher who had never acted, and she earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
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 flopped twice in Italy until a shortened cut won the Cannes Grand Prix, and it went on to win the foreign-language Oscar.
Q 11Which Vittorio De Sica film follows Antonio Ricci and his son Bruno through a desperate post-war search?
Bicycle Thieves
Bicycle Thieves' lead, Lamberto Maggiorani, was a real factory worker, and when he went back to the factory after filming he was laid off.
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 Roberto Benigni was so overjoyed at its foreign-language win that he climbed onto the backs of the seats before heading to the stage.
Q 13What name, traced to a 2002 New York Times article, is given to Nigeria's prolific home-video film industry?
Nollywood
Q 21Which New Zealand director became the first woman to win the Palme d'Or, for The Piano in 1993?
Jane Campion
Jane Campion lost the Best Director Oscar for The Piano to Steven Spielberg, then won it 28 years later for The Power of the Dog.
Q 22Which 2023 Justine Triet courtroom drama won the Palme d'Or and then the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay?
Anatomy of a Fall
France passed over Anatomy of a Fall as its Oscar entry, choosing The Taste of Things, yet Justine Triet's film won Best Original Screenplay.
Q 23Which 2011 French comedy-drama about a quadriplegic and his carer was inspired by the life of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo?
The Intouchables
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
India passed over RRR for its international feature Oscar entry in favour of Last Film Show, yet RRR's 'Naatu Naatu' won Best Original Song.
Q 15Which Italian city's film festival, first held under Mussolini, is the oldest in the world?
Venice
Venice's festival grew so political that in 1938 Mussolini and Hitler overruled its jury, and France set out to launch a free rival at Cannes.
Q 16Which Italian director cast TV cowboy Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars?
Sergio Leone
Sergio Leone wanted James Coburn, who cost too much, and settled on Rawhide's Clint Eastwood for $15,000.
Q 17Which French magician turned filmmaker landed a capsule in the Moon's eye in A Trip to the Moon?
Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès saw A Trip to the Moon pirated by Thomas Edison and others, and after going bankrupt he sold toys and sweets from a stall at Gare Montparnasse.
Q 18Which Spanish director's All About My Mother won the foreign-language Oscar before he won for writing Talk to Her?
Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar kept an office job at the phone company Telefónica for twelve years while shooting his first Super 8 short films.
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 ends with the girl walking through a tunnel singing Aloha ʻOe, the song her father missed at her recital, until soldiers bring her to safety.
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 was Franka Potente's breakthrough, and four years later she starred opposite Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity.
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 became The Raid: Redemption in the US because Sony couldn't secure the plain title, and the subtitle left room for sequels.
Q 25Which 1998 Hideo Nakata film follows a cursed videotape whose viewers die seven days later?
Ringu
Ringu was remade in Hollywood as The Ring in 2002, which moved the cursed-tape story from Japan to Seattle.
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 scandal in which a US military mortuary official had formaldehyde poured down a drain into the Han River.
Q 27Which 2002 Hong Kong thriller did Martin Scorsese remake as the Best Picture winner The Departed?
Infernal Affairs
Infernal Affairs's remake finally won Martin Scorsese a Best Director Oscar, after he had lost for films such as Raging Bull and Goodfellas.
Q 28Which director of Raise the Red Lantern staged the opening ceremonies of both the 2008 and 2022 Beijing Olympics?
Zhang Yimou
Zhang Yimou spent the Cultural Revolution as a farm labourer and then seven years in a textile mill before he became a filmmaker.
Q 29Which 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.
Q 30Which 2021 Ryusuke Hamaguchi film, adapted from Haruki Murakami, was the first Japanese Best Picture nominee?
Drive My Car
Drive My Car was meant to shoot in Busan, but the pandemic halted production, so Ryusuke Hamaguchi rewrote it and moved the story to Hiroshima.