Sightlines · about
Sightlines is an atlas of roughly 1,500 films — a way to find cinema by what a film is actually about, by how it feels, and by the lines of influence that connect it to the films around it. It is a personal project, not a database dump: every film was chosen, written up, and wired into the web by hand and with care.
There are several ways into the collection, all drawing on the same underlying layer of facets, dossiers, and lineage — browse by facet on Explore, describe what you're in the mood for on Ask, pull on a film's influences in Trace, or wander the film-theory map in the Galaxy. Every film also has a junction page: its facets, a scholarly reading of the film (the dossier), and its place in the craft graph — three lenses on the same title.
You can also browse a library of guided, spoiler-free film courses — curated runs of films tracing a genre, movement, craft, or idea.
New here, or want to build a list, save a PDF, or generate a short film course? How it works → walks through every page, step by step.
The heart of the system is a dossier written for every film against a fixed template — industry & production, technology, technique, narrative, genre, authorship, movement, era, themes, and reception. Because each card covers every dimension, facets can be re-extracted as the vocabulary grows without ever rewriting the cards.
The browseable facets come from two layers working together. A rule layer resolves curated facets from signals already attached to each film — TMDB keywords and genres, director, original-title script, and craft markers from the dossiers. On top of that, language-model passes (using Claude) read each film's plot and its full dossier to infer the things keywords miss — that a film is about justice, or addiction, or the atomic age — and to fold thousands of fragmentary keywords into a few dozen coherent concept dials. The lineage graph is built the same way: specific craft debts between films, not vague resemblance.
Under the hood it's plain Python and static HTML/JavaScript, with one small live endpoint for the mood finder and off-collection lineage tracing. Film metadata and posters come from TMDB.
Facets are the dials you browse by — mood, subject & theme, setting, character, craft, movement. Two things are worth knowing about them.
First, facet groups combine related facets. Rather than expose the thousands of raw keywords hanging off each film, Sightlines folds tightly-related ones into a single coherent concept dial — “Drugs & addiction,” “Nuclear & the atomic age,” “Surveillance & social control.” One dial quietly absorbs its synonyms and near-neighbours, so you browse by the idea rather than by fifty overlapping tags.
Second, facets are deliberately not precise. They're inferred — by rules, and by language-model passes reading each film's plot and dossier — not hand-stamped one film at a time. And a film is rarely “about” a single thing: it's about several, to different degrees. So a facet marks a film that substantially belongs, not one that satisfies a strict definition, and reasonable people will disagree at the edges. That looseness is intentional: it's what lets a search for “justice” or “memory” or “the atomic age” surface films you'd never have filed there yourself. Treat facets as doors into the collection, not an exact catalogue — they're built for discovery, not classification.
Beyond its facets, every film carries a reading through the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze — the French thinker who, in his two Cinema books, built a whole system for describing what film does with movement and time. It rests on two big ideas: the movement-image (classical cinema, organised around action — perception, then feeling, then deed) and the time-image (modern cinema, from Neorealism onward, where time itself surfaces and characters watch rather than act). Beneath those sit dozens of finer concepts — the affection-image and the close-up, the crystal-image, the seer, the powers of the false.
On Sightlines those concepts become a second set of facets: each is a doorway to the films that embody it, mapped in the Galaxy and defined in plain language in the glossary. You don't need to know Deleuze to enjoy them — they're written to make you notice how a film thinks, not to impress. And curated runs of these films are gathered as guided, spoiler-free courses.
Sightlines was designed, written, and built by Adrian Chan — a service and AI-interaction designer — at gravity7.com, where he also curates Inquiring Lines, a library of AI & LLM research — the semantic-search and recommendation methods documented there are the same ones Sightlines applies to film. It's an ongoing experiment in tracing how influence travels through film over time. If it sends you toward a film you'd never have found, it's doing its job.