Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Where every film director is from

Title card reading 'Where every film director is from' in black, red and amber on cream, beside a world map of hexagons shaded from pale yellow to dark red by the number of film directors born there, darkest in Europe, the eastern United States and India. Text: the birthplaces of 43,619 film directors in Wikidata, from the silent era to the 2020s.

Every film has a director, and every director was born somewhere. I mapped the birthplaces of 43,619 film directors in Wikidata to see which cities made them, how the map has moved since the silent era, who left home to make films, and how long it took for women to appear.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, knows 78,729 people who have directed at least one film. Some are household names, most are not: silent-era directors of one-reel comedies, documentary makers, television people who made a single feature, actors and musicians who tried directing once. For 43,619 of them it records where they were born, and for 41,753 that birthplace has coordinates.

So I put them all on one map. The interactive version has a decade slider, a filter for women and for well-known directors, a search box, and lines showing who made their films in another country. Click any hexagon and you get the directors born there, best known first.

World map of film directors' birthplaces counted in hexagons: darkest across western and central Europe, the north-eastern United States and California, with dense clusters in India, Japan, Korea, Iran, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, and only scattered hexagons across Africa and Central Asia
Where 41,753 film directors in Wikidata were born. Darker hexagons hold more directors.

A city of directors

Wikidata often records a district rather than a city: Brooklyn, a Paris arrondissement, Neuilly-sur-Seine. So I grouped every birthplace within 30 km of a big city. New York comes first, with 1,469 directors, then Paris (1,368), London (756), Los Angeles (642) and Rome (636). Tehran (444) is the first city outside Europe and the Americas, ahead of Tokyo.

Per head, the list turns over. Prague has 45.1 directors in Wikidata for every 100,000 people living there now, and Copenhagen 37.6. Tokyo has 1.1 and Mumbai 1.1. That is partly history, because a director born in 1930 was born in a much smaller city, and partly the record: some countries’ film archives have been copied into Wikidata much more thoroughly than others.

Two bar charts. Left, directors born in each city: New York 1,469, Paris 1,368, London 756, Los Angeles 642, Rome 636, then Prague, Berlin, Moscow, Tehran and Buenos Aires. Right, per 100,000 people living there now: Prague 45.1, Copenhagen 37.6, Munich 23.1, Stockholm 22.1 and Rome 19.0
Directors born within 30 km of each city, as a count and per 100,000 present-day residents.

From Europe and America towards Asia

The United States is the birthplace of 7,243 directors, about one in six of those with a birth country, followed by Germany, France, Italy and India. But the map moves if you sort directors by the decade of their first film. Of those who debuted by the 1950s, 83% were born in Europe or North America and 12% in Asia. Since 2000, the figures are 67% and 23%. India’s share doubles, and South Korea and Iran, almost absent in the early decades, each now account for about 1.9% of new directors.

Stacked bar chart of directors' continent of birth by the decade of their first film, from before 1910 to the 2020s. Europe is about 60 per cent until the 1960s and about half afterwards; North America is largest in the 1910s; Asia grows from a sliver to about a quarter in the 2000s and 2010s
Where directors were born, by the decade of their first dated film.

One industry is missing from that story. Nollywood makes more films than almost anyone, yet Wikidata has a birthplace for only 33% of the 372 directors whose films are mainly Nigerian, so Nigeria barely appears on the map. Its directors are there in the films, just not in the biographies.

Born here, made films there

For each director I took the country that produced most of their films and compared it with where they were born. 15%, about one in seven, made their films mainly in another country, and that share has hardly changed in a hundred years. The biggest flow is from the United Kingdom to the United States (416 directors, from Charlie Chaplin to Ridley Scott), then Canada to the United States (232), and Austria and Poland to Germany. Of directors whose films are mainly American, 20% were born abroad, and 24% of those who debuted in the 1930s, when Hollywood was full of directors from Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.

Map of the North Atlantic with curved lines from birth countries to the countries where directors made most of their films. The thickest runs from the United Kingdom to the United States, others from Canada, Germany and France to the United States, from Austria and Poland to Germany, and from Algeria to France. A box lists the largest flows: UK to US 416, Canada to US 232, Austria to Germany 124, Poland to Germany 117
The largest flows of directors from their birth country to the country of most of their films.

Where the women went

The first film director in this data who was a woman is also one of the first directors of all: Alice Guy-Blaché, who made her first film in Paris in the 1890s. Lois Weber, Mabel Normand and Gene Gauntier directed in America in the 1910s, Anna Hoffman-Uddgren in Sweden and Luise Fleck in Vienna. Then the door closed. Women were 3.1% of directors who debuted in the 1920s, and stayed below 5% in every decade until the 1970s. Since then the share has climbed: 24% in the 2010s and 32% in the 2020s so far.

Line chart of women's share of directors by the decade of their first film, flat at around 3 to 5 per cent from the 1910s to the 1960s, then rising steadily to 32 per cent in the 2020s; a dashed line for notable directors follows a similar path and reaches 43 per cent
Women’s share of directors, by debut decade, for all directors and for notable ones.

Women were 3.1% of directors who debuted in the 1920s. In the 2020s they are 32%.

Women’s birthplaces follow the same broad map as men’s, and so do the birthplaces of the best-known directors, those with 20 or more Wikipedia and other Wikimedia pages, except that fame is even more American: the United States is the birthplace of 38% of notable directors, more than twice its share of all.

Two small world maps of birthplaces, one for women directors and one for notable directors with 20 or more sitelinks. Both are densest in Europe and the United States; the notable map is sparser everywhere and especially thin outside the United States and western Europe
Birthplaces of women directors (left) and of notable directors (right).

A map of who keeps records

All of this rests on what Wikidata happens to know. Almost every notable director has a birthplace (99.5%), but only 25% of those with one sitelink or none. Directors whose films are mainly Russian, Italian or Iranian usually have one; Canadian, Danish or Nigerian directors usually do not. So the map is best read as the open record of film, rich where archives have been copied in and thin where they have not.

Bar chart of the share of directors with a known birthplace by the country that produced most of their films: Hungary 88 per cent, Russia 84, Italy 82, Iran 81 and Poland 80 at the top; China 39, South Korea 37, Australia 34, Nigeria 33, Denmark 32, Canada 31 and Peru 29 at the bottom
How often Wikidata knows where a director was born, by the country of their films.

How I did this

Two queries to Wikidata through the QLever service gave every person who directed an item classed as a film, with their birthplace, birth date, gender and number of sitelinks, and every film credit with its release date and countries of origin. I placed each birthplace in its present-day country with Natural Earth outlines, grouped birthplaces within 30 km of cities of a million or more, took each director’s first dated film as their debut, and took the country of most of their films as their country of work, treating the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other former states as covering all their successors. Everything is in the paper, with the code and data on GitHub.

The usual caveats apply, and here they matter a lot. Wikidata is not a census of film-makers. It includes actors and musicians who directed one film, it records gender for 90% of directors and mostly as a binary, and its coverage depends on which national film databases have been imported. Country of birth uses today’s borders, so a director born in Lviv in 1900 counts as Ukrainian.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Wikidata, via QLever (qlever.cs.uni-freiburg.de), retrieved 2026. CC0.
  • Natural Earth countries and populated places, with population estimates. Public domain.
  • Paper: Hotham, T. (2026) Where every film director is from: the birthplaces of 43,619 film directors in Wikidata. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23847840
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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