Marshall Islands0:00/276.0321× I mentioned this film many posts back as the kind of thing I was hoping for from each country; the people of the Marshall Islands were unhappy that they hadn’t been represented on film. There were many things they could have done, but they
Iran0:00/290.4533331× There are two films here. The first is an astonishing technical tour de force, a 135 minute film shot in a single take, complete with flashbacks. How you can manage flashbacks within an uninterrupted take is something I never thought possible, but it’s done here,
Paraguay0:00/324.4161× The thing about thrillers is that they’re highly structured, or at least they should be. Things happen in thrillers that don’t usually happen in real life. Crucially, for a thriller to actually cohere, the separate elements of the plot all need to tie together
Batches 12 130:00/478.4426671× I'm writing this at the end of June. The blog has been live for a month now. After writing too far ahead at one point (I had seven weeks of posts scheduled to go live) I've reached a point where
Kiribati0:00/305.1306671× I started with four rules: 1) A country as defined by the UN. 2) A commercially released film which is feature length (as defined by the BFI). 3) “The film would need to be either made in the country of origin, produced in it or meaningfully
Eswatini0:00/289.5146671× The reason I’m favouring horror isn’t because I like being scared (although I freely admit that I do) but because extremes push us to show our real selves. Well, as much as narrative fiction can anyway. Buying a film from every country isn’t
Driven Copilot Mad Pt 10:00/424.5304311×Driven Copilot Mad Pt 20:00/566.4213331× I was talking about awkward films with Copilot (well, not awkward films, but countries for which films are proving awkward to acquire) and it said I'd probably struggle to find a film
Equatorial Guinea0:00/331.1573331× I should probably stop opening these pieces with “Now, I don’t know much about…” because it’s starting to make me sound unusually parochial, but in the case of Equatorial Guinea all I know is that it’s probably on the equator (and that’
AI AI Oh Pt 10:00/488.1706671×AI AI Oh Pt 20:00/501.7386671×Batch 110:00/80.4481× I find AI fascinating. That's partly because I grew up on classic science fiction (so I've always thought that machine intelligence was inevitable), partly because
Uruguay0:00/234.6453331× We're back on firm ground here: horror. The premise of The Last Matinee is initially extremely simple (locked in a cinema, the patrons watching a horror film are killed one by one) and the film opens with a lovely aerial tracking shot that follows
Vanuatu0:00/171.4986671× I’m trying to watch these films blind. I may have a vague notion of genre, but ideally that’s as much as I’ll know so that my reactions are uncoloured by expectation. For the most part it works, but if I’d known what
Lesotho0:00/187.1146671× You can never underestimate the importance of a title. There are whole teams in Hollywood who work with focus groups just to make sure that the title of the next blockbuster works. Or resonates, as they’re more likely to say. Vibes, probably. They’re titlemaxxing,
Project Notes
I Feel Like A Spy0:00/494.0586671× I have mentioned previously that I bought three editions of the Great African Films series (Volumes 2, 3 and 4) and being a completist knew that I would need to track down copies of 1 and 5. I’d set up eBay
Project Notes
Batches 7 8 90:00/246.7626671× My acquisition strategy so far has pretty much been "buy what I can". Not because I have money to burn but because I wanted to have enough discs available to be able to actually start blogging this. (The planning stage of
Review
Burkina Faso0:00/264.3413331× It became clear quite quickly that much of Africa was going to be an issue for me. I faced three distinct problems: 1. I need a film on disc 2. I need subtitles 3. I am not in Africa Nearly all countries in Africa have
Review
Israel0:00/358.721× I’m far less likely to be critical of a film from a country that’s never made one than I am for one that has an established and experienced film industry. Sick of not seeing themselves represented, for instance, the people of the Marshall Islands
Review
Iraq0:00/179.9466671× I knew a film made in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussain was not going to be fun. I expected that. So when Son of Babylon started off warmly as a quasi-road movie in which a quiet, elderly Kurdish woman (Um-Ibrahim) from
Review
Portugal0:00/269.8881× My tolerance for art house horror is probably different to that of most people. It’s not that I’m a pretentious pseudo-intellectual who relishes obscure cinema (although I freely admit that I probably am), it’s that I like to view films as their
Project Notes
Batch 60:00/292.0746671× Quite a frustrating search this time, because Copilot didn't seem to want to suggest anything useful. I kept throwing countries at it for it to check to see what's available only to get bizarre replies along the lines of "x,
Review
Malta0:00/256.4906671× There are two kinds of boat films. There are the kind in which the ship that people find themselves on is actively trying to kill them (either because there’s a lunatic on board – Dead Calm – or because the vessel itself is the lunatic – Death Ship)
Review
Chad0:00/280.5546671× In case I’ve not already made it clear, I should explain what I’m looking for in a film. I want to be entertained, yes, but I also want to be treated as an intelligent adult: I don’t want to be given easy answers
Review
Algeria0:00/164.0746671× It was always going to happen eventually: I was going to see a film I didn’t like. I’d half-expected it to be the first film I watched (irony is like that) but was surprised by my raunchy thriller from the Democratic Republic of
Project Notes
Final 1950:00/284.5653331× Because I am doing this in a variety of ways (sometimes I shop from work on my phone, other times I’m on a PC, others again I’m on a tablet) I am constantly double-checking to make sure I’m not making a
Review
Afghanistan0:00/192.321× Sometimes, it’s hard to like a film. David Cronenberg’s Crash, for instance, is a masterpiece, but it’s a cold, brutal film. I admire it, but it’s also the very antithesis of “fun”. A film doesn’t need to be fun to be