Hi Product Hunt 👋 I'd finish a film and want to know where it actually takes place. Not where it was shot — where the story happens. Nowhere had a good answer. So: 169,861 films, series, variety shows and documentaries, each placed on a night-side globe at the location its story is set. 6,500 places. Zoom in and the city lights turn into posters. Three things I got wrong first: 1. Filming location is the wrong fact. I started by pulling filming locations, because that's the data that's easy to get. But "shot in Vancouver" tells you nothing about a film set in New York. Switching to narrative location shrank the dataset and made it mean something. 2. My clever idea didn't work. For the world map in the admin I built the basemap out of the atlas's own 6,557 story locations — no external data, perfectly on-brand. It was unreadable: the Sahara, Siberia and inland Australia have no stories set in them, so the continents never appeared. Replaced it with real coastlines. A map has to be a map first. 3. Weight was the actual engineering problem. The dataset is 776 MB. The first screen is 4.26 MB — columnar binary arrays instead of JSON, brotli, per-place sharding, versioned immutable caching. Data comes from Wikidata (CC0) and TMDB. Ten languages, place names included. No account needed — sign in only if you want your saved titles to follow you between devices. Two honest gaps: 49% of titles still have no poster, and plenty of locations are wrong or missing. Every card has a "wrong place?" button, and I read every submission myself. Which film did you look up first?

World Cinema Atlas

Films and series, mapped to where their stories happen

Films and series, mapped to where their stories happen