Spaghetti Westerns, Godzilla, and Kung Fu movies were the only reason I knew there we're any foreign films when I was growing up in a world film with 3 and a ½ TV Stations: The networks and PBS on the UHF if you got the foil wrapped, just right, on that thick wire loop screwed in to the back of the TV, just below the rabbit ears brown flat wire.
So in Junior high school, when my father was transferred to Sasebo, Japan, a whole world of cinema opened up to me. Without American TV to fill my life, I spent most of my time just wandering around Sasebo. Sometimes with some Temp friends, (When you moved as much as we did, you understand after 2 years you're never going to see the people you're hanging out with again). Other times I'd wander alone because I liked to study things and that just made me even weirder to the other military brats, so I spent a good deal of time by myself.
The crime rate was basically nonexistent, so even though I was only 12, I had free rein in the town. I took cabs, rode my bike all around town, or walked for miles exploring the city. I spent a lot of afternoons in Japanese Movie Houses. Instead of multiple screens, these theaters played different movies in a single large theater. It was possible to go into the theater at 10 o'clock in the morning and not get out until 7 or 8 at night, without seeing the same movie twice. When Enter the Dragon, with Bruce Lee, came out it was only a double feature and I sat and watched it 3 times. I can't even remember what the other movie was, even though I watched it twice, But, Enter the Dragon, I still check out that movie every year, or so. We returned to the States in the summer of 74 and it wasn't until I got old enough to drive and find an art-house theater that I was able to see foreign films with any frequency again and when VHS came down the pipe I really started exploring the world through film.
I especially like to watch good lower budget foreign films that are shot on location. The backgrounds are real and there's a lot of gabbing a handy person who actually does, whatever it is you want to get on the screen, from bull fighting, to cooking in an authentic way, or just sitting on a bench feeding pigeons. If the film is historical you get to see history from their perspective. So you get to see some reality of the country that the film came from. How they see the past. A good example of this is Marketa Lazarov̀a a 1969 Czech master piece about a feud between two rival medieval clans. It is a gritty, believable, look at medieval life in somewhere other than Britain, France, or Venice. I'll be recommending that film next.
"Companeros" poster by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Companeros.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Companeros.jpg
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