Hollywood still thinks it’s the pinnacle of cinema with its big budgets, bigger explosions, and a safe formula that rarely surprises anyone. But if you’re willing to look beyond Tinseltown, you’ll discover that other countries have been creating beautiful films steeped in their cultural lore, films that sting you with their beauty and brutality in equal measure. Take Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1958 masterpiece, The Ballad of Narayama, for instance. It’s a Japanese movie that feels both uncomfortably real and theatrically distant, all at once.

This painfully beautiful film is set in a mountain village that forces its elders to climb to a cold death on Narayama once they hit seventy. The film wears its kabuki heritage on its sleeve. Elaborate wooden sets border a babbling brook, matte-painted skies swirl blood-red, and misty evenings fade into pure black at the drop of a hat, only to snap back under stark, natural light seconds later. A narrator, dressed head-to-toe in ink robes, guides us through each ritual, much like the chorus in a play, reminding us that this is more fable than documentary.

At the heart of this melancholy tale is Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka), a widow who greets her fate with the dignity that comes with her age. Her neighbor, Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi), can’t bear the injustice and rages against it. Orin’s son, Tatsuhei (Teiji Takahashi), loves his mother fiercely and fights his duty in silence, while his own kid, Kesakichi (Danshi Ichikawa), mocks her for still having all thirty-three teeth, until she pounds down on a rock and returns bloodstained and toothless. It’s the kind of harrowing image that sticks to your ribs.

Yet, even as Kinoshita lays bare starvation and superstition, he peppers the film with song, dance, and the changing seasons’ lush colors. Spring blossoms, summer greens, autumnal reds, and the final blanket of snow all wash through the village, each transition is a reminder that life moves on, no matter how cruel the custom. There’s something hopeful in that cycle, even then.

If you prefer your suffering served stark and simple, you can watch the 1983 Cannes winning remake. It’s a bleaker, grittier take that’s more rooted in dirt and stone; it ditches the theatrical backdrops for raw locations. It’s a fine film in its own right, but it loses a bit of the original’s haunting lyricism. That version is easy to find on YouTube; this first one, thankfully, lives on at Apple TV+.

A movie like The Ballad of Narayama would have never broken into the box office in the West. But at the same time, that is what gives it power. It’s an unflinching look at humanity’s darkest rituals, filtered through a fable’s unforgiving glow.

Great stories aren’t confined to Hollywood’s borders. They’re waiting in every corner of the globe—sometimes in the shadow of a snowy peak, sometimes in a dusty village, but always alive with possibility.