Hidden treasures: five overlooked foreign films from the 1960s

Across Australia, late-night film buffs gather at Melbourne's Astor Theatre or Sydney's Hayden Orpheum to watch rare prints on celluloid. Even with the country's appetite for world cinema, certain 1960s international masterpieces remain stubbornly under-the-radar, since streaming platforms favour blockbusters over boutique treasures. Sasquatch Video specialises in hard-to-find, classic, foreign, silent, animated, cult, documentary, and genre films, so a gift certificate is one of the few reliable ways to track down forgotten gems that mainstream algorithms never surface.

The five films below were made between 1960 and 1969, span four continents, and mostly never received proper Australian theatrical runs. Each has a devoted cult following overseas, but local cinephiles may have only caught them through late-night SBS broadcasts or retrospectives at ACMI or the Sydney Film Festival. They are obscure because of distribution rights and the passage of time, never for lack of quality. What follows is a quick comparison, a closer look at each title, and a few suggestions for building your own retrospective.

A snapshot of five overlooked gems

Film	Director	Country	Year	Approx. runtime
Le Trou	Jacques Becker	France	1960	132 min
The Exterminating Angel	Luis Buñuel	Mexico	1962	95 min
Harakiri	Masaki Kobayashi	Japan	1962	133 min
Woman in the Dunes	Hiroshi Teshigahara	Japan	1964	147 min
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors	Sergei Parajanov	Soviet Union (Ukraine)	1965	97 min

These five selections share long takes, deliberate pacing, and themes that resist categorisation. Three come from East Asia, two from Europe, and one from Latin America, reflecting the global scope of 1960s arthouse cinema. None rely on star power or marketing muscle; they survive on critical reputation and the dedication of cinephile distributors.

Le Trou (1960): France's final celluloid triumph

Jacques Becker was already ill with leukaemia when production began, and he died before Le Trou reached cinemas. Released posthumously in 1960, it became his swansong and one of the most unflinching prison dramas ever filmed. Based on a real 1947 escape attempt from La Santé Prison in Paris, the story follows five inmates planning to tunnel out of their cell. Becker cast four of the actual escapees alongside Philippe Léotard, lending the work a documentary texture few fiction features match.

The second half is nearly dialogue-free, relying on drills, dripping water, and heavy breathing to build tension. Viewers used to brisk Hollywood editing may find the pace glacial, but the slow rhythm is exactly what makes the escape feel earned. Le Trou received limited Australian distribution in the 1960s and rarely resurfaces in retro programming, so a specialty release through Sasquatch Video is one of the cleanest paths to a high-quality print.

The Exterminating Angel (1962): Buñuel's banquet of bourgeoisie

Luis Buñuel spent the 1960s in Mexico, where his Spanish-language films found greater creative freedom than his earlier work under Franco's censorship. The Exterminating Angel is his sharpest satire of upper-class hypocrisy: wealthy guests attend a dinner party in a Mexico City mansion, only to find themselves inexplicably unable to leave the room. Days pass, social niceties collapse, and the guests turn on each other, exposing their true natures.

The premise sounds like horror, but Buñuel treats it as a deadpan comedy of manners, with surreal flourishes that grow stranger as the evening wears on. Australian audiences may not realise the film helped inspire the Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter" and indirectly influenced later locked-room Hollywood thrillers. It is rarely screened at mainstream multiplexes, so most viewers will need a specialty retailer or an SBS World Movies broadcast to catch up.

Harakiri (1962): Kobayashi's quiet howl against feudalism

Masaki Kobayashi's samurai films have largely been overshadowed internationally by those of Akira Kurosawa, yet Harakiri stands among the finest jidaigeki ever made. The plot follows an elderly ronin who arrives at a clan's estate requesting an honourable suicide in the ceremonial hall. Rather than granting his wish, the clan elders force him to recount why he has come, and the tale he weaves slowly indicts the entire feudal system.

Shot in stark black and white with deep-focus compositions, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. Australian cinephiles who fell in love with samurai cinema after watching Seven Samurai may find Harakiri's melancholy even more affecting. The Criterion Collection restored it in 2012, but the easiest path in Australia remains tracking down a boutique edition through specialty retailers.

Woman in the Dunes (1964): Teshigahara's existential fable

Hiroshi Teshigahara was a sculptor-turned-filmmaker whose career nearly ended when he fell out of favour with Japanese studios in the early 1970s. Woman in the Dunes is his most enduring work, an adaptation of Kobo Abe's novel about an entomologist captured by villagers and forced to shovel sand with a widow at the bottom of a dune. The film won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1964, the same year Kobayashi's Kwaidan took the top prize.

Watching it today, the work feels eerily contemporary, exploring bureaucratic absurdity, romantic dependence, and the meaning of labour. Sydney and Melbourne film societies occasionally programme it as part of broader Japanese retrospectives, but the average viewer is unlikely to find it on commercial streaming. A specialty release through Sasquatch Video remains one of the cleanest paths to a properly restored print.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965): Parajanov's Carpathian poem

Sergei Parajanov's masterpiece comes from an unlikely corner of the Soviet film industry: the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine. Made at the Dovzhenko Film Studios, it adapts a 1911 novel by Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky and follows a Hutsul love story across generations of village life. Cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko shot the work in dense, saturated colour that looks like a folk painting come to life.

Soviet censors were baffled by the non-linear structure and ethnographic detail, and significantly re-edited it for release. The original version was suppressed for decades, and Parajanov was later imprisoned on trumped-up charges. Australian viewers who encountered the film at Ukrainian community screenings in Melbourne or Brisbane during the 1980s often remember it as a revelation. Outside those diaspora circuits, it remains genuinely hard to find, which is precisely where Sasquatch Video's catalogue excels.

Building your own hidden-gems retrospective

• Start chronologically, working from Le Trou in 1960 through to Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors in 1965 to trace the decade's evolution
• Watch in original language with subtitles, since dubbed prints often blunt the cultural texture
• Pair the screenings with regional cuisine, matching Harakiri with a simple izakaya spread or Woman in the Dunes with a Hutsul-inspired mushroom dish
• Host a small-group screening rather than streaming alone, since films like The Exterminating Angel spark particularly rich conversation