Challenge: One Film for every Country

Early 2024 update?...

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For Estonia, I’d recommend Tangerines.
Taiwan, early Ang Lee films are good ir I love Hou films. Dust In The Wind, Daughter of the Nike.

I would second that though the movie is a Georgian one too (a collaboration). So, I'd mostly suggest it for Georgia. The director and screenwritter is a Georgian and it takes place in Georgia. The main actor is an Estonian. Anyway, the theme is international one.

What are the rules of this game?

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." M.T.

It is a challenge I set for myself a long time ago, trying to expand my world cinema knowledge. The point is to try and watch a film from every country in the world, or at least from as many countries as possible since some smaller nations have never produced a film.


The rules are a tad vague because the lines of which country does a film belong to tend to be blurry (as your example illustrated) but it is up to you to decide exactly how you want to count films.

Okay, to start with, for Bulgaria, I suggest some old time story, kind of Eastern (Western):
Manly Times (1977)

A story about old time traditions of some ethnic minority of the Rhodope mountains, featuring one of the biggest movie stars in the country. Hope you to find it with subtitles (avoid the dubbed ones), the vocal sounds are very important.

I assume you are Bulgarian?


One of the few I have found for the country, (though I haven't watched it yet) is The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner. Any thoughts?

Yeah, try it, I'm curious what you'll say. That's of the new era. It is a system supported movie so I guess that's what can be found world wide.
You know, in 1990 the western world was totally changed because of the Berlin Wall, most of the countries are different so the film industry too (from LA to Moscow). Bear that in mind.

The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner (2008) is one of the most popularized movies of the new era (it was the candidate for the Oscars). I would suggest some other movies by its director Stefan Komandarev who is riding high in EU during the last decade.

Just added this to my watchlist.


To me, this is more of a checklist-like thing. I don't put any specific goal other than maybe watching one from every country before I die?

I recently completed all of South America, which doesn't sound like a big accomplishment but is actually the only continent for which every country has a film available.


Recent watches: Bulgaria, Uruguay, Paraguay, Liberia and Greenland (which is not a country, but still a fun one to include in a separate category)

Small update on this as I knocked off Bahrain and Madagascar, the latter with a film I had been struggling to find for a while. Finally someone uploaded it on Youtube with English subs. It is a Malagasy retelling of Macbeth

End of the year update on this.

In the past 6 months I watched films from Montenegro, Guinea-Bissau, Burundi, Palestine, Kosovo and Vatican City.

Yes, Vatican City has produced a shitty little Christian propaganda film, called Beyond the Sun.

From the ones above, Paradise Now from Palestine and Hive from Kosovo were quite decent.

I am hoping to progress even further in 2025 as there are still quite a few films to watch before I hit the eventual stumbling block.

Why not just get invested in the scenes themselves if you really wanna educate yourself? It might take more than just 1 movie.

Obviously this is what I have been doing by expanding my horizons with cinema inside and outside the context of this challenge. This is more of a checklist experiment, not a deep exploration of a country's film industry.

However I should say that in the process of doing this challenge I have also come to expand my idea of cinematic borders, what you correctly call 'scene', as a lot of these countries have only a handful of films released. The more you watch, the more you observe regional patterns emerging. For instance, there is a large set of common traits in a lot of films from sub-Saharan Africa and other former colonies in South America and the Caribbean. Usually the protagonist is someone returning from the Western world to their home country, rediscovering their roots by exploring their respective traditions and opting to stay. There is also a large dose of treating white people as villainous in an almost caricature fashion. Both are understandable given the historical context of course, but nevertheless, this is in my book getting invested in and educating yourself about the cinema of a region. A lot of the films themselves may not be very well made (especially from countries that have a nascent film industry, if you can even call it that), but the overall themes that arise can be very eye-opening.

Although it is understandable that a country that may not draw too much attention to the untrained cinematic eye like Iran for example needs more than a single film to be explored as thoroughly as possible since it has a deep and diverse tradition in cinema, the overwhelming majority of the countries out there don't have that and their few forays into film-making are the only way to try and get a glimpse of these peoples' values, anxieties, aspirations etc.

I already know all that, I'm just saying that it would have to be more that 1 per whenever possible.

Well yeah...nobody said that after 1 movie you completely understand the cinema of a country.

But at the same time when you start one country, you should spend some time there to really grip it.

I worked on this a bit during January catching films from Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Somalia, Djibouti, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Uzbekistan.


Unfortunately none was even remotely decent.

Overdue 2025 update...

New ones are in red, but there are also a bunch I didn't put in from UK, Japan, and other countries that I've already tackled.