About Film Archive

Film Archive is a cinephile's sovereign island. A shared catalog of roughly 147,000 films sourced from Film Arch, layered with hand-curated enrichment — school, meta-genre, theme, mood, director suit — wrapped around a private archive where you grade, rank, and reflect on what you've watched.

What it is

Two halves, kept distinct on purpose.

Public catalog. Films, people, credits, titles in many languages, external rankings (TSPDT, Sight & Sound, Cahiers, awards), genre/country/language tags. Anyone can browse.
Personal archive. Watched + watchlist + watch plan. A 16-tier letter+star grade (A+, A, B+, …, F). Slot-and-pool ranking on the All-Time Board, plus Era boards (5 historical buckets) and Country boards. Statistics dashboards. Private by default; opt-in publish.

What it is not

Not a social-first app. No timeline, no follower-feed primacy. Likes/comments/reviews exist but are layered on top of the archive, not the entrance.
Not Letterboxd. Letterboxd's public ratings are core. Film Archive's grade is private; the public 0–10 rating is a voluntary aggregate channel, not the personal axis.
Not IMDB. IMDB is metadata reference. Film Archive treats canonical metadata as table stakes; the moat is the curation layer above it.
Not a recommender. No algorithmic feed. Discovery is via Collections, Lists, and search. You pick; the system does not push.

Design philosophy

Cinephile-minimal aesthetic: warm off-white background, deep-ink-blue accents, generous whitespace, Cormorant Garamond for titles, system sans for UI. Empty renders empty. No carousels, no hero images, no encouragement copy. Coverage over yield. Private by default, opt-in publish. Desktop for editing, mobile for browsing.