World Map Showing Number of Movies I've Seen per Country
78 DOWN, ONLY 124 TO GO
Some time ago, I decided to try and see a movie from each country in the world. Not an easy task, since there are many poor nations without a local movie industry -- but this is still a work in progress.
And since I like maps so much, it only seems logical that I would try and show this information graphically. So here is my first go at it.
Some notes about the map:
1) I'm not sure that the map exactly matches the list of 'countries' I've been using at this point. I haven't checked every little dot to see if it is a recognized 'state' or not. So, if you look closely, you will see that I've seen a movie from the Palestine and Israel both but French Guiana is part of France and shows how many movies I've seen from France. I've based my list on First Level Internet Domains -- think .US .UK and .JP. I also follow Wikipedia's List of Sovereign States for emerging states like Kosovo, Montenegro, Timor-Leste and the like. So, for me to include a state in my list, it has to have both a country code and be internationally recognized as being independent or largely self-governing. But don't worry, there are going to be things that don't work for some people out there -- like Hong Kong and Taiwan listed separately from China.
2) I used this Wikipedia map as my base -- someone else actually drew the map and I've just coloured in the countries according to my scheme.
3) Dealing with extinct states is a bit tricky. I have counted but not shown the following countries: Soviet Union (7 movies), Czechoslovakia (3 movies), E Germany (1 movie) and Yugoslavia (1 movie). However, Germany (44 movies) includes the W German state as well as Unified Germany prior to and post partition [mostly because I've been lazy and haven't wanted to do the research to break it all apart].
4) Generally, I follow IMDb's country classification. However, this causes problems since IMDb lists countries based on amount of financing. For example, The Cup (1999) and Travellers and Magicians are both joint Bhutanese and Australian films but with slightly different classifications in IMDb. Rather than trying to track both, I generally assign a single country to a given movie. In this case, since the latter is primarily about Bhutan but had more Australian financing, I classified it as a Bhutanese film. Okay, it's not perfect, but it's my list.
5) Travelogue type films (think Globe Trekker or Rick Steve's type stuff) if included on my list (mostly so I don't re-request if from my library) and documentaries (think PBS as well as movie style documentaries) about a country are always listed according to where they are produced. Thus, even though I've seen a 1 hour documentary about Kenya as well as British movies set in Kenya, I've yet to seen a Kenyan film. However, this again can be tricky since many African films have relied quite heavily on financing and production facilities in more developed states (France, US, UK, Germany, etc). Again, if the movie shows life in Chad and is about Chadian people then even though the financing is French, I classify the film as being Chadian.
6) Excluding 5 above, I generally don't worry if a given piece of work was released as a feature film in movie theatres somewhere on the planet or was made for TV (including entire TV series and occasionally single shows from a long-running series where I cannot get or don't want to watch the entire series) or even released only on VHS/DVD -- I watch them all. I tried for a while to include movies I've seen on PBS, but generally, I only include things that I've seen on DVD/VHS. This mostly affects the number of things I've seen from the US and UK, but I've also watched an entire German and Polish TV series and they were counted for my statistics.
Some time ago, I decided to try and see a movie from each country in the world. Not an easy task, since there are many poor nations without a local movie industry -- but this is still a work in progress.
And since I like maps so much, it only seems logical that I would try and show this information graphically. So here is my first go at it.
Some notes about the map:
1) I'm not sure that the map exactly matches the list of 'countries' I've been using at this point. I haven't checked every little dot to see if it is a recognized 'state' or not. So, if you look closely, you will see that I've seen a movie from the Palestine and Israel both but French Guiana is part of France and shows how many movies I've seen from France. I've based my list on First Level Internet Domains -- think .US .UK and .JP. I also follow Wikipedia's List of Sovereign States for emerging states like Kosovo, Montenegro, Timor-Leste and the like. So, for me to include a state in my list, it has to have both a country code and be internationally recognized as being independent or largely self-governing. But don't worry, there are going to be things that don't work for some people out there -- like Hong Kong and Taiwan listed separately from China.
2) I used this Wikipedia map as my base -- someone else actually drew the map and I've just coloured in the countries according to my scheme.
3) Dealing with extinct states is a bit tricky. I have counted but not shown the following countries: Soviet Union (7 movies), Czechoslovakia (3 movies), E Germany (1 movie) and Yugoslavia (1 movie). However, Germany (44 movies) includes the W German state as well as Unified Germany prior to and post partition [mostly because I've been lazy and haven't wanted to do the research to break it all apart].
4) Generally, I follow IMDb's country classification. However, this causes problems since IMDb lists countries based on amount of financing. For example, The Cup (1999) and Travellers and Magicians are both joint Bhutanese and Australian films but with slightly different classifications in IMDb. Rather than trying to track both, I generally assign a single country to a given movie. In this case, since the latter is primarily about Bhutan but had more Australian financing, I classified it as a Bhutanese film. Okay, it's not perfect, but it's my list.
5) Travelogue type films (think Globe Trekker or Rick Steve's type stuff) if included on my list (mostly so I don't re-request if from my library) and documentaries (think PBS as well as movie style documentaries) about a country are always listed according to where they are produced. Thus, even though I've seen a 1 hour documentary about Kenya as well as British movies set in Kenya, I've yet to seen a Kenyan film. However, this again can be tricky since many African films have relied quite heavily on financing and production facilities in more developed states (France, US, UK, Germany, etc). Again, if the movie shows life in Chad and is about Chadian people then even though the financing is French, I classify the film as being Chadian.
6) Excluding 5 above, I generally don't worry if a given piece of work was released as a feature film in movie theatres somewhere on the planet or was made for TV (including entire TV series and occasionally single shows from a long-running series where I cannot get or don't want to watch the entire series) or even released only on VHS/DVD -- I watch them all. I tried for a while to include movies I've seen on PBS, but generally, I only include things that I've seen on DVD/VHS. This mostly affects the number of things I've seen from the US and UK, but I've also watched an entire German and Polish TV series and they were counted for my statistics.
posted by xj at 9:18 PM
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