Argentine films nominated for the Oscars: all eight titles
Every Argentine film nominated for Best International Feature, including the two winners, La historia oficial and El secreto de sus ojos.
Argentina is one of the strongest countries in Latin America when it comes to the Oscars, with eight nominations and two wins in the international category. La historia oficial made history in 1986 as the first Latin American film to take the prize, facing up to the wounds of the dictatorship. Then El secreto de sus ojos won in 2010 with a blend of crime story and impossible love. More recent nominees show the range of the country's cinema, from the savage humor of Relatos salvajes to the courtroom tension of Argentina, 1985.
Argentina in Best International Feature
1975 · La tregua · Nominated
An aging widowed accountant finds a late love in this adaptation of Mario Benedetti's novel.
Worth it if: you enjoy delicate romances about getting older.
1985 · Camila · Nominated
The true story of Camila O'Gorman, a young woman in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires who ran away with a priest.
Worth it if: you like forbidden love stories based on true events.
1986 · La historia oficial · Winner
A history teacher begins to suspect that her adopted daughter is the child of a woman who disappeared under the dictatorship.
Worth it if: you want a tense drama about memory and guilt.
1999 · Tango · Nominated
Carlos Saura follows a director staging a tango show in Buenos Aires, with dance and drama blending together.
Worth it if: you love dance and visually striking musicals.
2002 · El hijo de la novia · Nominated
A restaurant owner in crisis helps his father keep a promise: to marry his wife, who has Alzheimer's, in a church.
Worth it if: you like warm family comedies that bring a tear.
2010 · El secreto de sus ojos · Winner
A retired investigator returns to an unsolved murder and to a love he never declared, with Ricardo Darín.
Worth it if: you want a gripping crime story with a romance at its heart.
2015 · Relatos salvajes · Nominated
Six stories about people who finally snap. Dark, funny and very cathartic.
Worth it if: you enjoy black humor and revenge stories.
2023 · Argentina, 1985 · Nominated
Prosecutors Julio Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo take on the military juntas in court, with Ricardo Darín.
Worth it if: you like courtroom dramas and real history.
How many Oscars has Argentina won?
Argentina has won Best International Feature Film twice: La historia oficial at the 1986 ceremony and El secreto de sus ojos at the 2010 ceremony. The country has eight nominations in total in this category.
How Oscar nominations work
Each branch of the Academy picks the nominees in its own field, so actors choose actors, directors choose directors and editors choose editors. The whole membership can nominate for Best Picture, and the whole membership then votes on the winners. That two-step process is why a film can dominate the nominations and still leave the ceremony with very little.
A quick note on dates: this post uses the year of the ceremony, not the year the film came out. A film released in one year usually competes at the ceremony held early in the next, which is why the same title can appear under two different years depending on the source.
Want to turn this into a watchlist? On Rankiew you can mark what you have seen, rate each title from 1 to 10, write a short review and build a public list to share with friends. It is a simple way to see how much of Oscar history you have actually watched.
