Some time after I posted about movies we watched in 2021, I got a year-end recap from Letterboxd. Surprise! Their recap includes a bunch of different stats, including release year, directors, languages, etc. One of these stats is country, and USA was on top by…a lot. There’s nothing wrong with that, and given that I am ‘merican & all, not a real surprise.
Still.
Ever since I’ve been able to, I’ve enjoyed watching international films. Back in college and especially grad school, I was a regular at film screenings of all types. However, without really meaning to, I’ve more recently stopped going to art house and foreign films. Chalk it up to no longer living in a college town, I guess.
So seeing that bar chart with USA towering over every other country like Shaq in Munchkinland was kind of a wake-up call. This called for a resolution to make a conscious effort to watch more global cinema. We’re making up the rules as we go, but we’re trying to evenly distribute our viewing across the continents (excepting Antarctica, though we’re committed to at least watching The Thing), and within those trying to hit as many different countries as we can. So far, we’re doing pretty well. We’ve hit every continent twice, with only North America lagging behind, but only because we’re not counting films from the USA.
Even though we’re only in March, we’re already finding there’s a trick to finding what films to watch. Services don’t tend to list their offerings by country, even less by continent, so I’ve spent a lot of time browsing trying to track down eligible films. BUT! I hit upon a promising strategy this weekend. Rather than just blindly search by country or continent, if you search Letterboxd and set the results to show “Lists,” nearly every country you punch in has at least one curated list of films made in or about the country. Yes!
Of course, the next trick is going to be tracking some of these films down, since not everything is available on streaming services we subscribe to. My guess is at some point we’ll need to hit our local (or university) library, but that’s a problem for another day.
If you want to follow along, my Letterboxd diary should be public. Don’t look for reviews or ratings, though. I’m marking stuff I liked, but that’s about it for now. I’ll leave more detailed thoughts to others.