First of all, I want to talk about the frustrations, perhaps in order to prepare anyone foolish enough to follow in my footsteps. One of the things about Letterboxd is that it's data is tied to TMDB (The Movie DataBase), not IMDB, and TMDB is crowd sourced. That means anyone can go in and change that data, make it more comprehensive or more accurate. I've done it more than once. And there are some anal retentive souls out there who may change the country of origin section while you're trying to score every country, and you'll be forced to take a step back and do it all over again. It happened to me several times, even just on the last WEEK of the project. (It removed Lesotho's This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, now considered a South African production only, and heartbreakingly, it was the best film I watched for the project bar none). I'm not sure what the criteria are for "country of origin" (does a company from the area need to be involved?), but I ended up not only doing "do-overs", but add entirely new places because I lost something that had been checked long before (whatever I had for Libya for example).
Availability is also a problem, especially for countries without a film making industry or tradition, so I ended up watching a lot of shorts that were available on YouTube or Vimeo in those cases, and not always the best possible ones. Some felt like home movies or tourist promo ads, but the point is, I've greened out the entire map!
The list of what I actually watched for the project is now available to the public!
The point of doing this isn't so much to get a massive BINGO high, but to make discoveries you otherwise wouldn't. Among the best, I could name the LGBTQ+ positive Joyland (Pakistan), the colonial treatise Sweet Dreams (Réunion), the veritably wild satire Walker with Ed Harris (Nicaragua), the beautiful Plaza Catedral (Panama), and the intriguing animated world of Battledream Chronicle (Martinique). In all, because a few territories could sometimes be covered by a single film, explaining the discrepancy, I watched 137 films, and only 19 scored 4 or more out of 5 stars. These include the comedy biopic Godard Mon Amour (Myanmar), the poignant short A Camel (Sudan), the highly relevant Gaza Mon Amour (Gaza), and the surreal revolutionary piece Soleil Ô (Mauritania). But of course, a 3½ with a "Like" next to it means those films are pretty great too, so go ahead and watch The Bra (Azerbaijan), Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (Estonia) and My Friend from the Park (Uruguay).
But what did I learn? Well, I already expected the cinematic Third World (if I can call it that - I simply mean places where cinematic expertise has to be brought in because there's no industry) to be filled with documentaries (people often express themselves first by showing themselves to the world and TO themselves), but I tried to go for fiction where I could (still ended up watching 43 documentaries). Those places might afford shorts, but not feature films, though I tried to go with longer features where possible (low accessibility still puts my short count at 45). But what was most interesting is how technology has evolved to the point where you can shoot a movie on a phone and edit it on a laptop, which means a lot of RECENT films, and that though some selections had incredibly low production values, a lot more were quite proficient. Did I watch absolute turkeys? Yes, 19 got 2 stars or less, which is dreadful, but I might only be angry at 5 or 6. The rest are at least interesting, if only as cultural/cinematic artifacts. Indeed, one of my favorite experiences WAS a cheap home-made movie out of Uganda, Who Killed Captain Alex?, which is hilariously inept in some ways and groundbreaking in others.
We can also look at each continent/region for some trends (although my sample is necessarily small). The Caribbean seems to be a spot where cheap American productions go to shoot, but Central and South America have a strong sense of magical realism mixed in with horror. What I hadn't seen of Europe was mostly what would have been behind the Iron Curtain, and there we find deep wounds left over from the Second World War and the Cold War, but as we move into the Middle East, in particular, Muslim countries, "issue" films become more prevalent. State-promoted misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are dead center. Africa was one of the larger blind spots (I could have "cheated" and watched a single documentary to checkmark most of Central Africa, but I just didn't want to see elephants get butchered), and my takeaway is that their cinema is still in its infancy. Somehow, they still manage to make poetic shorts and docs about still ongoing wars, though some of the richer states are plainly trying to emulate American movies (with variable success). I had Asia mostly covered, but there are still some beauties left to discover, like Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom (Bhutan). These tend to have Chinese or Australian money behind them, but I can see how other countries' cinema can't resist the dramatic landscapes. Finally, there's the mess of islands in the Pacific Basin, and islander cinema is definitely part of that Third World I was talking about. The documentary focus is on the environment and colonialism (partners in crime), while the fiction wants to recreate folk or real history.
Indeed, while one might be attracted to Western co-productions with big names, I wouldn't skimp on films made BY locals FOR locals, where traditions and attitudes are taken for granted and outsiders just have to limp along and catch up as things go. Sure, it's fun to travel like a TOURIST, which is what we are when James Bond goes to Jamaica or Thailand, but local cinema makes it possible to live in a reality not our own, not the one they build around resorts, or that are denied us by the Tower of Babel. For the last 11 months, I was entertained, but I also learned about the world. Anyone on my exact journey would be surprised to find a story that SURELY takes place in the remote past has a modern town just beyond the trees, or a country you'd written off as an assembly of huts based on its geography have characters all texting each other on their phones. It's a wild world out there, with a lot of different perspectives, incredible visuals (it's film, after all) and under-discussed histories. And yet, the biggest takeaway is probably that, wherever you go, people are people. We recognize ourselves even in the most remote cinema.
So do recommend such a journey? Of course I do! Maybe you don't need to be as nerdy as I was with it. Maybe you don't need to collect every little island territory like so many floating pogs. But you owe it to yourself to travel a little. This trip won't hit you in the pocketbook as hard, and it's all-access...
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