Where Every Film Director Is From: The Birthplaces of Film Directors in Wikidata, by City, Country, Debut Decade, Gender and Country of Work

Where are film directors born, and how has that changed? I use Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia, to map the birthplaces of everyone it records as the director of a film. Of 78,729 directors, 43,619 (55%) have a birth country and 41,753 a birthplace with coordinates, in 188 present-day countries. The United States accounts for 17% of directors with a birth country and 38% of notable ones (those with 20 or more sitelinks). Grouping birthplaces into city areas, New York (1,469) and Paris (1,368) lead; per head of present population, Prague (45.1 per 100,000) and Copenhagen (37.6). By debut decade, the share born in Europe or North America falls from 83% for directors who debuted by the 1950s to 67% for those who debuted since 2000, while Asia's rises from 12% to 23%. 15% of directors made their films mainly in a country other than their birth country; the largest flow is from the United Kingdom to the United States (416 directors). Women are 3.1% of directors who debuted in the 1920s and 32% of those who debuted in the 2020s. Coverage is very uneven: a birthplace is recorded for 99.5% of notable directors but 25% of those with at most one sitelink, and for 33% of directors whose films are mainly Nigerian. The atlas maps the open record of film, not every film-maker. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/director-birthplaces/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/director-birthplaces. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/director-birthplaces/.