My name is Alun, and I have a confession:
I have an absurdly large collection of shiny discs. Some of you reading this may think 100 DVDs is a lot. Some may consider 1000 too many. I have almost 10000.
This is, I know, somewhat extreme. But it’s my hobby, and I refuse to apologise for it. Some people take pleasure in Lego; others in going to watch their team play sport of some kind: I collect films and TV series. I have been doing it since the dawn of DVD, although I’ve now expanded to include Blu-rays and 4Ks.
I love films and TV, and I value the benefits of having a physical collection (not least because I live in rural Yorkshire in the UK and have no chance of ever getting cable. My streaming ability is minimal, and even then you’re at the whims of the licensors and acquirers at Netflix or Amazon. I have no such worry – if I want to watch an obscure silent American film I can. If I want to watch a popular TV series which has dropped off Prime this month, I can). And, because I’ve been collecting for years, the collection has expanded as have the available formats. Which is why I’ve now bought the Bond films on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and 4K. I am clearly mad. But mad in very high definition.
As I started to near 10000 (a number I never honestly expected to reach, and certainly didn’t intend to – it’s just snowballed along the way) I realised that although I’m a white, British male aged 51 and the collection therefore skews towards that demographic (lots of British TV from my childhood, for instance) I do actually own quite a lot of foreign films and TV. Not just the big hitters (I’m as much a sucker for the original Danish/Swedish The Bridge as anyone) but some obscure things too (a 12-part TV adaptation of The Ring broadcast only in Japan; the wonderful Russian Sherlock Holmes series from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s). In fact, when I added up my foreign titles, I realised that I could confidently claim to have films from more than 40 different countries. (Fell free to look at my collection here.)
And then I had the Terrible Thought. It was the sort of Terrible Thought that seems initially innocent but quickly becomes something else: could I possibly collect something from every country in the world? Would it even be possible?
The Terrible Thought evolved into the Terrible Idea and led to a huge and lengthy amount of research (okay, I simply asked ChatGPT) and it turned out that, yes, it was both possible and potentially incredibly time consuming. The Terrible Idea became the Terrible Plan; I could do it. Nay, I would do it. I would gather a collection of global DVDs/BDs/4Ks; one per country. The titles I already owned would give me a head start and for the remainder I would abide by an arbitrary set of rules that I invented:
The Goal: To collect at least one feature-length film from every country on Earth.
Rule 1: The list of countries. The UN recognises 195 member states and two observer states. With encouragement from Copilot, I increased that to include distinct territories with their own film production or investment identity, and also certain cultural regions (Hong Kong, for instance, counts as its own entity). This gave me a list of 213 distinct countries/territories. (Available here.)
Rule 2: The film must have had an official commercial release somewhere in the world. It would need to be feature-length (using the BFI/AFI definition of anything longer than 40 minutes).
Rule 3: The film would need to be either made in the country of origin, produced in it or meaningfully financed by the country.
Rule 4: Where possible I would favour horror as a genre (I have a notion that horror will be universal, whereas comedy or drama may not be as instantly accessible to outsiders), but will remain flexible for countries with little to no film industry. (I fully expect that for some of those I will only be able to complete this by buying feature-film documentaries.)
A note on AI usage: I strongly favour the use of AI in the spirit for which it was intended – as support and a research assistant. I will not use AI to generate text, but I will use AI to help search for films, to check availability, to act as a sounding board and to proofread these blog entries. All words will be my own, and I will primarily use Copilot because I find Copilot’s support the strongest.
I think this will be interesting. I think you (if you’re reading this) may be interested. (And if you’re not, then I am at least entertaining myself, and also Copilot, which is strongly acting as my enabler and seems determined to humour me no matter how outrageous my notions. I’m already starting to think Copilot’s secretly employed by Big DVD simply to get me to spend more. In seriousness, I am aware that some of these discs may well cost me more than a week’s wages in their country of origin, and even though I’m not actually paid more than the UK average wage I am still considerably better off than some. I don’t want to take the cultures from which the films originate lightly.)
This blog will be a record of my searches, my frustrations, my working relationship with AI, my joys, my failures and my ultimate (I hope) triumph as I complete this worldwide odyssey. Along the way I will share with you my thoughts on the films I track down from each country, my thoughts on eBay and its sellers, random observations on the global film industry, and possibly even my experiences with postal services around the planet.
Stick around. It’s going to be expensive fun.