Cinema has always crossed borders, but few filmmakers cross them in their own work. Some move to a new country and adapt. Others simply follow a story wherever it needs to go.
The nine directors below have each . The facts come from their well-documented filmographies, and the list covers very different careers and eras.
Ang Lee
Ang Lee was born in Taiwan and has worked comfortably in both Mandarin and English. His Mandarin films include Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The latter won the Academy Award for Best International Feature, then called Best Foreign Language Film.
In English he made Sense and Sensibility, Brokeback Mountain and Life of Pi. Lust, Caution returned to Mandarin in 2007. Few directors have moved between languages so often while keeping a recognizable sensibility.
Alfonso Cuarón
Alfonso Cuarón, from Mexico, began with Spanish language work such as Sólo con tu pareja. He then made English language films including A Little Princess, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Gravity. Y tu mamá también brought him back to Spanish in 2001.
Roma, released in 2018, is mostly in Spanish and Mixtec. It earned him the Academy Award for Best Director. His career shows how one filmmaker can shift between Hollywood and Mexican cinema without losing his voice.
Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro has split his career between Spanish and English. Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth were made in Spanish. Hellboy, Pacific Rim and The Shape of Water were made in English.
The Shape of Water won the Academy Award for Best Picture. His stop motion Pinocchio, released in 2022, was also in English and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Even his English films often carry the gothic fairy tale feel of his Spanish ones.
Alejandro González Iñárritu
Alejandro González Iñárritu made his name with the Spanish language film Amores perros. He followed it with 21 Grams and Babel, which used several languages in one story. Babel includes English, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese and Japanese Sign Language.
Birdman and The Revenant were English language films that won him back to back Best Director Oscars. Biutiful returned to Spanish. His 2022 film Bardo was in Spanish too, showing he still goes home when the material calls for it.
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Wong Kar-wai
Wong Kar-wai is best known for Cantonese language films like Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. Several of his works also include Mandarin and Shanghainese. He made his only fully English language feature, My Blueberry Nights, in 2007.
Happy Together, set largely in Argentina, features Cantonese and some Spanish. His later series Blossoms Shanghai, released in 2023, used Shanghainese heavily. His range lies more in dialect and setting than in a long list of languages.
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog is German and made classics such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo in German. He has also worked in English for films like Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Documentaries like Cave of Forgotten Dreams add further variety.
Some of his early work was shot in other languages, including Spanish and Quechua influenced settings in Peru. He has lived in the United States for decades. His narration in English has become almost as famous as his films.
Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar is closely tied to Spanish cinema, with films like All About My Mother and Volver. In 2020 he made his first English language short, The Human Voice. His first English language feature, The Room Next Door, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2024.
The Room Next Door stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore and won the Golden Lion at Venice. It marked a clear step outside the language he had worked in for his entire career. The film shows that even a very established director can still try something new.
Park Chan-wook
Park Chan-wook is a Korean director known for Oldboy and The Handmaiden. He made his English language debut with Stoker in 2013. The Handmaiden itself mixes Korean and Japanese, depending on the characters.
His 2022 film Decision to Leave involves Korean and Mandarin. In 2025 he released No Other Choice, a Korean language film. Across these works he has shown that moving between languages doesn’t have to change a strong visual style.
Bong Joon-ho
Bong Joon-ho is mainly associated with Korean cinema through Memories of Murder and The Host. Snowpiercer, in 2013, was his first mostly English language film, with some Korean and French. Okja mixed English and Korean as well.
Parasite, a Korean language film, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020. It was the first non-English language film to do so. In 2025 he released Mickey 17, an English language science fiction film starring Robert Pattinson.
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