The World Culture Link Collection of the WCH is intended to grow into an extensive collection of links to websites, video channels, blogs etc. that covers all countries and major cultural regions in the world. It by no means claims to be comprehensive but presents a critical selection of what we regard as the most rewarding, informative and inspiring resources that we could find.

If you think that we missed important sites, we’re open to criticism and suggestions. Feel free to send an e-mail to the site administrator.

The current page collects links of general interest for visitors interested in global culture and in classic art and literature: archives, online libraries, virtual museums, blogs, publishers with an international scope, magazines etc. The focus is on freely available resources in the public domain or under one of the creative commons and/or open access licenses.

Directories & Reviews

Open Culture

An extensive directory of free e-books, audio books, movies, artworks, textbooks and other educational media, featuring short, but informative reports about the latest available content.

The Public Domain Review

Hailed as “a model of digital curation” it features insightful essays about new and rediscovered literary, artistic and scientific works in the public domain.

Online Archives

Internet Archive

The most extensive collection of cultural documents and sources on the Internet and perhaps one of the largest ever created: millions of scanned books, magazines, scholary articles, educational resources, audio books, images, studio and live music, movies, historical documents, you name it. The Wayback Machine that initially started the project – an archive of snapshots of defunct websites – is today only one of many services provided by this invaluable gift to the Internet community and to the world in general, worth a Nobel Prize or two.

Wikimedia Commons

The media supplement of the popular Wikipedia which is listed further below, a vast, community-created collection of public domain images, videos and audio files many of which are linked into the respective Wikipedia articles.

Zeno.org

An online archive especially interesting for readers fluent in German. Although not all translations are up to contempory standards anymore, it offers a wide and useful selection of classical literature as well as historical, scientific and reference works. Even more interesting than the text sections might be the vast collection of more that 40.000 artworks, mostly by classic to modern European artists but also with some samples of the art of other cultures.

Ubuweb

A comprehensive collection of digitized avantgarde works and documents: concrete and visual poetry, sound art, audio, film etc. Founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith it has long been forgiven that it is was initially a kind of pirate website that cared little for the copyright status of the materials offered for free download here. Most of the originators are glad today that someone took on the work of saving these works for posterity.

Online Libraries

Classic Short Stories

The name of the site basically says it all. Apart from not a huge, but solid selection of classic works for short fiction enthusiasts it offers some useful links and bibliographic information.

HathiTrust Digital Library

Founded in 2008, the HathiTrust is a non-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries that has digitized more than 17 million items. For the normal user, without access via a partner institution, the majority of its items are search only. It still offers, however, more than 7 milion volumes that can be read online and even downloaded.

The Literature Network

Mostly a collection of literary classics, also some religious texts, reference works and nonfiction, complemented with some learning and discussion resources: forums for literary, philosophical and religious debates, collections of quotes, summaries and quizzes, and surveys of literary periods and movements.

The Short Story Project

The Short Story Project is an online space dedicated to the art of the short story form. Created by a tightly connected community of editors, translators and creatives passionate about literature, stories and storytelling, it gathers selected short stories from all over the world and makes them accessible in multiple languages and audio in an effort to create a curated, polyphonic panoply of outstanding short fiction.

Standard Ebooks

This growing selection of classic fiction and nonfiction is in itself nothing extraordinary. All of these works can be easily accessed elsewhere. The additional benefit of the Standard Ebook project, however, is to offer them as carefully produced and proofread ebooks in various formats (epub, azw3, kepub, advanced epub and for online reading), with nice covers.

Fadedpage

Somewhat comparable with Standard Ebooks, this is another initiative to create an archive of carefully produced free e-books, based on volunteer work.

World of Tales

Rewarding for young readers and parents as well as for students and scholars, it’s an extensive collection of children stories, falktales, fairy tales, and fables from all over the world: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America, with links to a number of classic fairy tale and fable collections.

Poetry

Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation – emerged from the Poetry magazine, that it continues to publish, in 2003 – is an American literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism to a wider audience. Its website offers short, but insightful biographies of classic and modern poets, essays about poets and poetical topics and a wide selection of poetic works.

Poetry.com

Poetry.com is a collaborative platform for poets worldwide, offering a vast collection of works by both renowned and emerging poets. It’s a community-driven project that serves as a hub for poets to share their works, receive feedback, and connect with like-minded fellow poets.

Poetry Daily

This site is build around the nice idea of presenting one new poem every day (that can also be delivered via e-mail newsletter). It is complemented with an archive, a news section, book reviews and essays.

Academy of American Poets

The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. Today its one of the leading publishers of contemporary poetry and funder of poets in the United States. Its website offers, apart from extensive information about its publishing activities, a wide selection of classic, modern and contemporary works.

The Poetry Archive

The speciality of this poetry collection is that it offers historically significant audio recordings of major poets reading their own works.

Reference

Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Britannica as such needs no introduction. Visitors of the online edition may miss the comprehensiveness and wealth of detail of the classic 29-volume book set. What it lacks in extend it somewhat makes up with accessibility. One of the most useful features of the online Britannica are the structured article collections that serve as useful introductions to numerous topics. The Britannica has the reputation of being especially competent in the field of history.

Encyclopaedia.com

Praising itself, perhaps justifiable, as “the world’s #1 online encyclopaedia”, it gathers content from more than 200 individual reference works, which explains why you may frequently find several articles for a given search term and why the scope and the depth of the articles varies.

Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

Comparable with the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (see below), it’s an academic information resource, hosted by the University of Tennessee at Martin, with extensive, peer-reviewed articles of a cross-cultural scope written by professional philosophers.

New World Encyclopaedia

New World Encyclopedia is a wiki-based encyclopedia which contains carefully selected articles that are rewritten and supervised by a team of editors with academic and literary qualifications. If differs from the origininal Wikipedia in that it is based on an editorial policy that includes a more rigorous article selection, editorial review process, and its wholesome value orientation: to organize human knowledge not just for its own sake, but for its value to the reader and the world as a whole.

Scholary Community Encyclopaedia

The idea of a community-created encylopaedia is extended here into a scientific reference resource, open for fresh ideas and approaches, covering fields from natural sciences to arts and humanities. It also features the peer-reviewed Encyclopaedia Journal with selected encyclopaedia content and the Encylopaedia Books that collect articles on specific topics.

Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

The no. 1 information source about philosophy on the Web, also noteworthy for readers interested in world culture because it includes many insightful articles about philosophical traditions beyond the Western canon.

Wikipedia

The concept of the Wikipedia should be known to everyone with even a faint acquaintance with the Internet, a huge, free general encyclopaedia entirely created by volunteers which has spawned versions in numerous languages and several related projects. The quality is not undisputed. In many cases the mutual corrections, extensions and discussions in the Wikipedia community have over time resulted in articles that are at least a solid starting point for further studies. Since most articles are basically open to modification by everybody, however, it can’t be denied that articles of peripheral or special interest are sometimes culturally, politically or personally biased.

World History Encyclopaedia

An unconventional encyclopaedia that presents a wealth of historical information in a manner especially suited for laymen, learners, students and adolescents, with survery articles, timelines, maps, source translations and various media.

Databases

WorldCat.org

The world’s largest online library catalog that offers an easy streamlined access to bibliographic and location data of millions of books, articles, dissertations and other media items in libraries all over the world.

Religious Texts

Internet Sacred Text Archive

The definition of “sacred texts” that this comprehensive and carefully curated collection implies, is rather generous and extends beyond English standard translations of the scriptures of world religions and peripheral belief systems to folk tales and literary works of spiritual significance, complemented with comments, introductions and scholary works.

Bibel-Online.net

An accessible, well-structured collection of mostly German Bible translations, featuring several editions of the Luther bible, complemented with the Biblia Hebraica, a critical edition of the Hebrew Tanach.

ERF Bibleserver

Perhaps the most comprehensible collection of Bible translations, in numerous languages from Arabic to Chinese, with a focus on German translations up until the latest translation efforts.

King James Bible Online

An online edition of the King James Bible, the authoritative English Bible translation commissioned by King James in 1604, first published in 1611 and codified in 1814 as a standard for all English-speaking Christians.

The Noble Quran

A great ressource to study the holy book of the Muslims both in English translation and in the Arabic original. Especially interesting are the audio recordings of each surah.

The Quran

Similar to the previous it also offers the complete text of the Holy Quran both in English and in Arabic, the latter not only in Arabic script but also in Latin transliteration.

The Gnosis Archive

A comprehensive collection of source translations, introductions, comments and scholary works connected to the Gnostic and Hermetic traditions, among others a complete translation of the Nag Hammadi library.

Sacred Books of the East

Sacred Books of the East is a 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious texts edited by the German-born British philologist and orientalist Friedrich Max Müller (1983-1900) and published by Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910, compiling essential sources of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, and Islam. This site offers free download of all 50 volumes as pdf files. The collection is also available in the Internet Archive.

Art Collections

Artvee

An extensive selection of high resolution image files of classic to modern classic artworks, aggrevated from the public domain sections of major museum websites, with numerous useful options for browsing and exploring.

Cantor Arts Center – Stanford University

The Cantor Arts Center of the Stanford University features a permanent collection of 38,000 works that are made accessible here by means of thematic portfolios, object type selections and geographic origin.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

The website of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, founded in 1913 and repeatedly extended and modernized up into the present, offers open access to more than 38,000 works in high resolution, with comments and detailed work information and explorable in detail via an elegant web interface.

Getty Museum Collection

The website of the world-renowned J. Paul Getty Museum – commonly known as the Getty – is the easiest way to research the vast collections of the museum, housed at two locations in Los Angeles, California.

Getty Open Content Program

The Getty also offers a significant subset of the museum’s collections as image files here, “freely available for study, teaching, and enjoyment”.

Google Arts & Culture

As one of the most useful and charitable projects of data kraken Google that somewhat counterbalances the corporation’s dubious business practices, this site offers easy access to the collections of numerous renowned international museums.

The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation – Collection Online

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, better known as The Guggenheim, founded by entrepreneuer and art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1939 and located today in a landmark building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, on the Upper East Side of Manhatten in New York City, is home to a continuously expanded collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art. Its online collection presents a searchable database of over 1,700 selected artworks by more than 625 artists from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection.

LACMA Collections

The LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States and has grown out of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, established in 1910 in the Exposition Park neighborhood. The most interesting aspects of its online presence are perhaps the presentations of Latin American, Asian and modern Islamic art, of 20th century fashion and of handicrafts such as glass and ceramics.

Library of Congress – Digital Collections

The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. needs no introduction as the world’s largest library, home not only of more than 30 million books and print media but also of countless manuscripts, historical documents, photos and media items of all kind. Its digital collections are maybe the most diverse listed here, an overwhelming richness of curated and commented collections not only of artworks in the strictest sense but also of historically significant documents from sheet music to maps, photos, postcards and much, much more.

The Met Collection

The website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art – or simply “the Met” -, the largest art museum on both American continents, located at two sites in Manhatten, offers access to about half a million works from the Met’s collections. It’s especially interestering for its many gateways into specific artforms and the art of various cultures and regions. Open access images are marked in the indexes (for more information see at the bottom of the page).

Open Access at the National Gallery of Art

The National Gallery of Art in Landover, Maryland, is home to more than 150,000 paintings, sculptures, decorative artworks, photographs, prints, and drawings from all eras of Western art. Its open access program offers high resolution image files of about 50.000 artworks for free download.

Rijks Studio

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is the national museum of the Netherlands, dedicated to Dutch arts and history. The online collection of almost 800.000 works has not surprisingly a focus on the golden eras of Dutch art, but offers some samples of Asian art as well.

Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art

Taken as a whole, the Smithonian Institution is the largest organization of associated museums, education and research centers in the world. Located around the National Mall in Washington D.C., it consists of several massive art, history, natural history and technology museums. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, presented online here, houses exceptional collections of Asian art, with more than 44,000 objects from China, Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, the ancient Near East, and the Islamic world, dating from the Neolithic period to today.

Music Archives

Archives of Traditional Music

The Archives of Traditional Music, hosted by the Indiana University, is an audiovisual archive that documents music and culture from all over the world. With over 100,000 recordings that include more than 2,700 field collections, it is one of the largest university-based ethnographic sound archives in the United States.

The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection

A digitized archive of almost 1,600 Ozark Mountain folk songs, hosted by the Missouri State University Department of Music, recorded between 1956 and 1976 by a traveling salesman from Springfield, Missouri, who took his reel-to-reel tape recorder into the hills and backwoods of the Ozarks, preserving the heritage of the region by recording the songs and stories of many generations of Ozark history.

World Literature

Literary Hub

Founded by editors Morgan Entrekin, Terry McDonell, and Andy Hunter in 2015 and funded by independent publisher Grove Atlantic, it has become one of the major sources of high-quality literary discussions on the Web, publishing personal and critical essays, interviews, and book excerpts from more than hundred partners, including independent and large publishers, bookstores, non-profit organizations and literary magazines.

Public Books

Many of the essays published in this “magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship” – which has a strong focus on literature, but is open to other artforms and various fields of scholarship as well – take new, reissued or classic books as an occasion to discuss wider aesthetic, social, philosophical and scientific issues of general interest. Founded by literature professor Sharon Marcus and anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom in 2012, it aims at uniting “the best of the university with the openness of the Internet”, publishing writing “that is erudite without being esoteric and brings scholarly depth to discussions of contemporary ideas, culture, and politics.”

Words Without Borders

Words Without Borders is, without a doubt, the best literary magazine for international literature on the Web (among others a role model for the WCH’s international science fiction magazine InterNova). Since its inception in 2003 it has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry and graphic novels from more than 140 countries, in high-quality translations from 136 languages, with a strong focus on marginalized regions and literatures and an open mind for all kinds of styles and genres. It has recently been restructured from publishing monthly thematic issues about specific regions and topics into a continuously updated e-zine. Well-organized reading lists make the richness of its archive accessible.

World Literature Today

World Literature Today is perhaps the best-known printed literary magazine for contemporary international literature. Its website is rewarding even for non-subscribers and features selected content from the print edition. Occasionally complete issues are made available online for free for a limited time.

Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature: An Overview

Founded by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History at the Brown University in Providence, and grown out of course material, it’s a growing collection of information about contemporary literature in English of countries and continents that were culturally shaped by the era of colonialism and imperialism.

Postcolonial Studies @ Emory

This blog, a pioneering project of digital humanities, founded by Deepika Bahri, Professor of English at the Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her students in 1996, does not only portray fiction writers and artists but also critics and theorists who are relevant in the wider context of postcolonial studies.

Three Percent

Three Percent, a lively, both visually as well as intellectually stimulating resource for international literature, hosted by the University of Rochester, New York, features news, musings and reviews of modern and contemporary world literature.

A Year of Reading the World

What started as a personal challenge of British writer, speaker and editor Ann Morgan – to read one book from each country in the world within a year -, has attracted a lot of attention and would not have been possible without the support from all over the world to actually find books in English translations even from countries without a considerable publishing industry. Her comments and musings collected on this website provide insights into many areas of the globe that are still black spots on the map of world literature. Her TED Talk about her reading experiences is also noteworthy.

world literature, world books

An extensive collection of short, but useful book reviews of mostly contemporary world literature by Danny Yee, without geographic limits, reaching from Africa to South East Asia.

Litprom

The Litprom, a Germany literary society based in Frankfurt / Main, follows for forty years now its mission to raise in the German language area the awareness for the literatures of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arabic world. Its website, available both in German and English, is most useful for members, but also features news and reviews of general interest.

World Music

World Music Central

Maybe the no 1 source on the Web of up-to-date reports and samples of music from all over the world, also useful for its collection of world music reference information such as glossaries, festival notes and musician biographies.

BBC Radio 3 – Music Planet – World Music archive

The BBC Radio 3, perhaps the culturally most significant of the BBC radio stations, broadcasts classical music and opera (it has been called “the world’s most significant commissioner of new music”), with jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also featuring. This archive collects recordings from more than twenty years of its Music Planet program.

RootsWorld

RootsWorld is primarily a world and roots-folk music magazine and radio program that is funded exclusively with readers and listeners donations. It features news, portraits, videos and samples of music from all over the world.

Traditional Music Channel

One of those Youtube channels that have misappropriated a video portal to exclusively present audio, with visuals serving only as illustrations. It presents a wide-ranging selection of traditional music compilations from Western and Eastern Europe to the Americas, Africa and Asia, even some from the Pacific area. The introductory notes are short but can serve as a starting point for further studies.

Global Art

Art Through Time: A Global View

A fresh, well-produced approach to the history of art from a global perspective through a series of 13 op-topic video lectures, hosted by the online learning platform Annenberg Learner.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The idea of this timeline is to make the history of global art and culture accessible through the rich collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To just call it a timeline, however, is actually an understatement, as the site presents a huge repository of artworks, chronologies, and more than 1.000 essays.

WikiArt

The main feature of this comprehensive online art encyclopaedia is its accessibility, indexing an impressive collection of artist short portraits and work samples by name, era, nationality, art school, style, genre, media and other criteria. As an additional benefit it does not limit itself to the canon of European art but also presents artists and artworks from the Americas, the Carribean, Africa, the Near East, Asia and Oceania.

World Cultures & History

The World Cultures & History section in the Digital Collections of the Library of Congress is a vast, ecclectic archive of media collections about artistic, folkloristic, pop-cultural, social, political and historical issues from all over the world. It’s one of these places of discovery on the Web where a user may frequently be delighted about finding things he never thought he was looking for.

Global Architecture

Dezeen

Who ever has researched architecture on the Internet can hardly have missed Dezeen, a high-quality architecture and design magazine with a global, open-minded scope, encompassing the traditional and the latest trends, with lots of photos, concise and insightful reports, enhanced with interviews and in-depth essays, one of those publications that have set standards for cultural magazines on the Web.

ArchDaily

Matched only by Dezeen this popular site is another great resource to keep up-to-date about the latest developments in international architecture.

Daily Architecture News

An interesting architecture news site that offers excellently written reports and well-produced videos, centered around a plethora of high-resolution photographs.

Institute of Classical Architecture & Art

The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) is a nonprofit membership organization committed to promoting and preserving the practice, understanding, and appreciation of classical design. To do so, the ICAA offers a broad range of educational programs. The ICAA website is not only useful for its members but also features articles and videos of interest for a general audience.

History in 3D

This project offers a chance to experience important locations of ancient architecture through walk-through and fly-by videos of detailed 3d reconstructions based on archaeological records, some of which have been repeatedly enhanced and updated.

Global Theatre & Performing Arts

International Theatre Institute

The ITI is the world’s largest organization for the performing arts with about 80 centres around the globe. It was founded in 1948 on the initiative of the first UNESCO Director General, Sir Julian Huxley and the playwright and novelist JB Priestly in 1948, with the intention of creating a platform for international exchange and for engagement in the education of the performing arts, for beginners and professionals alike, as well as using the performing arts to foster mutual understanding and peace. Especially its publications, events and the news section on its website provide valueable insights into the current developments of the performing arts from a global perspective.

IETM

The International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts is one of the oldest and largest international cultural networks, representing over 500 performing arts organisations and individual professionals worldwide. Its mission is to advocate the value of the arts and culture and to empower performing arts professionals through access to international connections, knowledge and a dynamic forum for exchange, creating opportunities for its members and the international performing arts community at large by organising networking activities, peer-to-peer learning, exchanges and dialogues via various events.

International Theatre Festival of Kerala

The ITFOK was conceived and launched in 2008 by the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi with the intention of promoting theatre as a strong medium for social change, cultural exchange and artistic expression. Over the years it has consistently and courageously provided a public platform for diverse voices, particularly those addressing human struggles creatively and through the arts, and artists resisting inequality and oppressive forces. The festival is especially noteworthy for its open-mindedness and the widely varying background of the invited performing troups, coming from Europe and the Near East to Inner, South and Southeast Asia.

PUSH INTERNATIONAL PERFORMING ARTS FESTIVAL

The PuSh Festival is organized on the traditional territories of several First Nations, primarily in the area of the ancestral seasonal village of K’emk’emeláy in British Columbia, Canada. Its founders Norman Armour and Katrina Dunn envisioned in 2003 a vibrant, mid-winter event series where Vancouver artists could forge relationships and opportunities with the rest of Canada and beyond. In more than two decades it has established itself as one of British Columbia’s signature cultural events, delivering audacious, innovative, contemporary works of live arts by acclaimed local, national, and international artists.

Theater der Welt

Theater der Welt, a featured event of the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute (ITI), is an international theater festival, held every three years in a different German city. Inspired by the ITI festival Theater der Nationen, which took place in Hamburg in 1979, it was founded by the ITI Germany in 1981 and since then has presented ground-breaking achievements and developments in theatre from every continent. It receives its core funding in three equal parts from the host city, the respective state, and the federal government (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media), while the archives of festival are managed by the ITI.

The Theatre Times

The Theatre Times is perhaps the most comprehensive, high-quality news source about international theatre on the Web. Launched in 2016, it has published over 5,500 articles covering theatre in 90 countries and regions. With 32 thematic sections, more than 150 regional Managing Editors, and over 60 international media partners, it has grown into the most far-reaching global theatre portal today. In addition to its original content, it filters through more than eighty sources, around six hundred articles, and thousands of pages of theatre news every day.

Global Cinema

BBC: The 100 Greatest Foreign-Language Films

In 2015 BBC Culture conducted the first of a number of film polls, asking major critics for their choices of the 100 greatest American films. Two futher polls asked for the best films of the 21st Century and the greatest comedies ever made and the organizers became sceptical with the fact that US American films dominated these two lists too. So in 2018 critics were asked again, this time to vote for their favourite movies made primarily in languages other than English. This site not only presents the list itself but also a number of critical reflections and historical excurses inspired by the results.

Festival de Cannes

The history of the Festival de Cannes dates back to 1938 when the interference of fascist leaders with the film awards of the renowned festival in Venice inspired a number of French jurors to found an own independent festival. Conducted annually since 1946, the Festival de Cannes has become perhaps the most famous film festival in the world, not the least popular as a meeting of internationally successful movie actors and directors. It should, however, not be underrated as a major showcase of new films of all genres, including documentaries, from all around the world.

INTERNATIONAL CINEMA

Each month the College of Humanities of the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (USA) holds free showings of international movies. The website of the International Cinema initiative not only features news and programs but also insighful short essays and background information about a remarkably wide and open-minded selection of movies, many from countries with lesser known local film productions.

International Confederation of Arthouse Cinemas

The Confédération Internationale des Cinémas d’Art et d’Essai was founded in 1955 by the national arthouse associations of France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, aiming at promoting cultural diversity in cinemas and festivals. Today it’s a non-profit association connecting over 2,400 arthouse cinemas with more than 4,400 screens, in 45 countries, including individual cinemas, not yet represented by a national network, and festivals across the world. The website provides news and reports about international film culture from the perspective of ambitious cinemas outside of the commercial mainstream.

Movements in Films

Instead of portraing individual films or directors, this interesting site makes the richness of international cinema accessible through a growing collection of beginner’s guides about film movements, from well-known ones such as the Italian Neorealism over historic episodes of Russian, French and German cinema up to more recent developments such as various Asian new waves.

MUBI

MUBI is, first of all, a paid streaming service for international films. If you dive deeper especially into the Notebook section of its website, however, you will discover an amazing collection of reports, reviews, interviews and columns, interesting even for non-subscribers, about both classic and contemporary films from all over the world.

The Greatest Films of All Time – BFI

In 1952 the British Film Institute’s magazine Sight and Sound for the first time asked critics to name the greatest films of all time. The poll was repeated every ten years since then, increasing in size and scope each time and has become the most famous, most prestigious and most discussed of all best films lists. After Vittorio de Siccas neorealist masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (1952) topped the first list, Orson Welles’ directing debut Citizen Kane (1941) reigned supreme for fourty years until the late recognition of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo (1958) displaced it in 2012. The poll’s latest edition in 2022 was perceived as a major shift, with a record number of voters and a list with significantly more works by black and female directors. For the first time a film directed by a woman was voted the greatest film of all time, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) by Chantal Akerman.

Stacker: 100 Best International Movies of All Time

Another best films list, this time by the distribution platform Stacker that evaluated scoring data from the film databases IMDb and Metacritic to compile a list of the best films in languages other than English and produced primarily outside of the USA. The ecclectic list, reaching from classics over works by European auteurs to highlights of Asian cinema, provides a good starting for delving into global film culture.

Taste of Cinema

The main attraction of this excellent film lover website are perhaps its lists, an extensive collection of well-written and insighful movie recommendation of all genres, top actor performances and not the least best-of selections of the film production of numerous countries.

Toronto International Film Festival

The TIFF is more than a film festival that annually presents the best of Canadian and global cinema for more than half a century now. It is also a non-profit cultural organization with a mission to transform the way people see the world through film, offering screenings, lectures, discussions, festivals, workshops, events, professional development and opportunities to meet, hear and learn from filmmakers from Canada and around the world.

The World Cinema Challenge

The maker of this website has set herself/himself the challenge of watching one movie from every country in the world. The last posting is from 2018 and the mission seems not to have been completed, but what is here – informative and perceptive comments on movies from countries whose film industry is in many cases underdeveloped and little known outside of their borders – is worth to be preserved and recommended. BTW: A similar project, focusing on literature, is Ann Morgan’s A Year of Reading the World (see in the above section World Literature).

World Cinema Projekt

Eminent director Martin Scorsese created the World Cinema Project (WCP) in 2007, recognizing the urgent need to preserve, restore, and provide access to films from around the world. To date, 70 films from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America, South America, and the Middle East have been restored, preserved, and exhibited for global audiences. As part of the WCP, the African Film Heritage Project (AFHP) was launched in 2017 in partnership with the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) and UNESCO, in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna, to preserve the legacy of African cinema.

Link Collection: General Resources