The name “Sophie Scholl” probably meant nothing to a lot of you, as it did to me, when it was read in the title of this German film as one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars last month. The people of Germany, though, know the name well. Sophie Scholl was a university student who, in 1943, was a member of an anti-Nazi resistance movement called the “White Rose.” The group felt that the German public was being deceived about the progress of the war, which they realized was unwinnable. They hoped via pamphlets containing suppressed information about Germany’s losses and defeats, especially those at Stalingrad, to provoke a student uprising that would spread through the country, forcing Hitler’s regime to sue for peace.

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, and probably the first film to be shot in the language of Tsotsi-Taal, Tsotsi is a story from a place that must certainly be teeming with them—the endless shantytowns that surround the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, with a collective population of 10 million people.

At a time when the status of immigrants in our society is getting so much attention, it’s worth recalling that the history of Hollywood, which for better and worse is the mythology of the modern era, is a history shaped largely by immigrants. The business was built by studio heads in the 1920s and 1930s who were at most first-generation, and its creative side in the important years of the pre-World War II era was shaped by a flood of creative talent fleeing Europe.

Fernando Eimbcke came to his debut as a feature-film director from a career making music videos and commercials, but you’d never know it from his first film, Duck Season (Temporada De Patos). It’s an unhurried, soft-impact, subtly suggestive work that stands in contrast to countless other such debuts and to most of the other films on the market in recent years, for that matter.