Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, knows 78,729 people who have directed a film, and where 43,619 of them were born. This is their map: the cities that made directors, the slow move from Europe and America towards Asia, the directors who left home to make films somewhere else, and how long it took for women to appear.
Every film has a director, and every director was born somewhere. Put those birthplaces on a map and you get a strange, lopsided picture of the world: crowded around Paris, New York, Rome and Prague, thin across Africa, and changing decade by decade as new film industries grow. It is also a picture of who has been written down. Wikidata records a birthplace for 55% of its directors, almost all of the famous ones and only a quarter of those with one sitelink or none.
So read the map as the open record of film, not a census of it. Drag the decade slider to see where the directors who debuted in each decade were born, filter to women, or to well-known directors only (those with 20 or more Wikipedia and other Wikimedia pages), search for a name or a city, and click a hexagon for the directors born there.
Hexagons: directors born inside each hexagon, under the filters above; zoom in for single birthplaces (circles). Decade: the decade of a director's first dated film in Wikidata. Flow lines (in Map layers): directors who made most of their films in another country, from their birth country to that country. Directors whose birthplace has no coordinates, or is a whole country, are not on the map but count in the charts. Source: Wikidata (CC0). Outlines and city names: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
Group every birthplace within 30 km of a big city together, so that Brooklyn counts with New York and Neuilly with Paris, and New York comes first with 1,469 directors, then Paris (1,368), London (756), Los Angeles (642) and Rome (636). Just ten cities account for 17% of all directors on the map. Tehran (444) is the first city outside Europe and the Americas, ahead of Tokyo (393).
Directors born in each city
Birthplaces within 30 km of a Natural Earth city of a million people or more. Per head: per 100,000 people living there today, cities with 50 or more directors. Hover a bar.
Per head the order turns over. Prague has 45.1 directors in Wikidata for every 100,000 people who live there now, and Copenhagen 37.6, far ahead of New York (7.7). The giant cities of Asia barely register: Tokyo has 1.1 and Mumbai 1.1. Part of that is history, since today's population is a poor guide to the city a director was born in decades ago, and part is the record: Wikidata is far fuller for some film cultures, Czech, Danish, Swedish, than for the cinemas of India or China.
The United States is the birthplace of 7,243 directors, 17% of everyone with a birth country, followed by Germany (3,262), France (2,715), Italy (2,293) and India (2,285). Europe as a whole accounts for 51%, Asia 20% and Africa 2.8%. Switch to notable directors and the American share more than doubles, to 38%: fame, as Wikipedia measures it, is even more concentrated than film-making.
Directors by country of birth
Present-day borders. Notable: 20 or more sitelinks (3,835 directors). Hover a bar for the share of women.
Sort directors by the decade of their first film and the map moves. Of directors who debuted by the 1950s, 83% were born in Europe or North America and 12% in Asia. Among those who debuted since 2000, Europe and North America are down to 67% and Asia is up to 23%. India's share doubles from 3.1% to 6.0%, South Korea's grows from 0.2% to 1.9% and Iran's from 0.5% to 1.9%, while the United States falls from 20% to 16%.
Where directors were born, by debut decade
Share of directors with a birth country, by continent of birth and the decade of their first dated film. Before 1910 is pooled. Hover for numbers.
Rising and falling birth countries
Share of each debut decade's directors born in each country, from the 1910s.
Nigeria is the hole in this story. Nollywood is one of the largest film industries in the world, yet only 114 directors born in Nigeria debuted since 2000 in this data (0.6%). Wikidata has 372 directors whose films are mainly Nigerian, and a birthplace for just 33% of them. The map can only show the directors someone has written down.
For each director I took the country that produced most of their films and compared it with where they were born. 15% of 42,950 directors made their films mainly in another country. The biggest single flow is from the United Kingdom to the United States (416 directors, Charlie Chaplin and Ridley Scott among them), then from Canada to the United States (232), and from Austria and Poland to Germany. China to Hong Kong and Algeria to France follow the routes of history.
The largest flows
Directors born in one country whose films are mainly from another, present-day borders. Click a bar to draw the flows on the map.
Hollywood has always been a city of incomers. Of 8,455 directors whose films are mainly American, 20% were born abroad, and among those who debuted in the 1930s 24%. The share dipped after the war and has come back: 22% for directors who debuted in the 2010s. Small countries next to big film industries send the largest shares abroad: 37% of directors born in Slovakia worked mainly in the Czech Republic, and 36% of directors born in Austria made their films mainly abroad, most of them in Germany.
Born abroad: directors of mainly American films
Share born outside the United States, by debut decade. Before 1910 left out (too few).
Alice Guy-Blaché made her first film in Paris in the 1890s, and the early silent era had a handful of women directors: Lois Weber, Mabel Normand and Gene Gauntier in America, Anna Hoffman-Uddgren in Sweden, Luise Fleck in Vienna. Then the door closed. Among directors who debuted in the 1920s, 3.1% were women, and the share stayed below 5% in every decade until the 1970s. It reached 9.1% in the 1970s, 24% in the 2010s and 32% in the 2020s so far.
Women's share of directors, by debut decade
Directors whose gender Wikidata records (90% of all). Notable: 20+ sitelinks.
By birth country, across all decades, women make up the largest shares among directors born in Canada (27%), Switzerland (26%) and the Netherlands (24%), and among the smallest are India (8.2%) and Japan (8.5%). Because these shares mix decades, a country whose directors are mostly recent looks better than one with a long film history, so the decade chart is the fairer comparison.
Women's share by country of birth
Countries with 150 or more directors of known gender, all decades: the twelve highest and the eight lowest.
Two caveats. Wikidata records gender for 90% of directors, and mostly as a binary: 63 directors have another gender recorded. And the rise is partly a rise in recording: recent directors, and women among them, are more likely to have an entry at all.
Half of all directors in Wikidata have 1 film to their name and 53% exactly one. At the other end, 353 have fifty or more. The record holder is Louis Feuillade, with 254 films from 1906 to 1925, most of them silent shorts, ahead of Lau Lauritzen Sr. in Denmark (217) and the American B-film director Sam Newfield (203). The most prolific woman is Alice Guy-Blaché (75).
The most prolific directors in Wikidata
Film items with this person as director. Click a row to see the birthplace.
Notable directors almost always have a birthplace in Wikidata (99.5%); directors with one sitelink or none, only 25%. And the gaps are not spread evenly. A director whose films are mainly Russian, Italian or Iranian usually has one; one whose films are mainly Canadian, Danish or Nigerian usually does not, because many entries came in bulk from film databases that list titles and names but not birthplaces.
Directors with a known birthplace, by main film country
Countries with 350 or more directors whose films are mainly from there: the ten highest and the ten lowest.
Wikidata knows where 1,469 directors from New York were born, and 33% of Nollywood's.
Directors. One query through QLever returned every Wikidata person who is the director (P57) of at least one item that is an instance of film (Q11424), with their birthplace (P19), its coordinates and country, date of birth, gender, number of sitelinks and number of films: 82,886 rows for 78,729 directors. Unknown values were dropped. A second query linked 282,877 director credits on 264,652 films to their publication dates and countries of origin. Because the query asks only for directors of films, it includes actors, musicians and artists who directed one film, and a few bands credited as directors of concert films; 978 directors have no English label in the extract.
Birthplaces and countries. A director's point is their birthplace's coordinates (41,753 directors, 11,190 distinct places). 1,770 birthplaces are a whole country and give a country but no point. The birth country is the present-day country the point falls in (Natural Earth); it agrees with the birthplace's Wikidata country for 99% of directors. So a director born in Lviv in 1900 counts as Ukrainian. City areas group birthplaces within 30 km of a Natural Earth city of a million people or more (55% of points), and per-head figures divide by that city's present population: a rough guide only.
Decades and countries of work. A director's debut decade is that of their earliest dated film in Wikidata (95% have one), which may miss earlier shorts or television work. Their main film country is the country of origin of most of their films, splitting co-productions equally; films of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the German states and British India count for every present-day successor when deciding whether a director worked abroad, so a Ukrainian-born Soviet director is not counted as a migrant.
Gender. Women and trans women are counted as women, men and trans men as men, and other values as another gender. Shares exclude the 10% of directors with no gender recorded.
What this is not. It is not a census of film directors, nor a ranking of national cinemas. Coverage is uneven between countries, between decades and between famous and obscure directors, as section 08 shows. Sitelinks measure attention on Wikipedia, not talent: the most linked "directors" include Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, but also Thomas Edison, Madonna and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.