If you have a list of missing countries, let me know and I'll see about getting them added. So far, I have:

• West Germany
• Czechoslovakia
• Yugoslavia

Let me know if you see some others.

• German Democratic Repulic (East Germany)
• Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)

I'm not sure into how much detail you want to go, as movie have been created for some time now. e.g. http://www.themoviedb.org/person/29110-carl-froelich (first hit for the relevant time from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Regisseure_des_deutschen_Films)

• Greater German Reich (Nazi Germany 1933-1945)
• German Reich (Weimar Republic 1919-1933)
• German Empire (Monarchy 1871–1918)

If someone feels like going through a list... good luck ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_states

You could use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 just like Musicbrainz does. -> https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Release_Country lists some historical countries.

We do use ISO 3166-1. If you look at the list West Germany and the countries we're discussing here are not on it as independent countries. That's the issue here. They're not part of the current standard and are currently lumped into their current country ie. Germany, or even worse, in Czechoslovakia's case, they re-assigned the CS value to Serbia and Montenegro.

If you could add the Soviet Union, that would be great. Soviet Cinema is so strikingly different from modern Russian cinema.

Another one to consider is Kosovo. It's marked under the "User-assigned" group on the Wikipedia list.

Any chance of this is changing any time soon? Feels like adding a bunch of countries should be a relatively quick fix, no?

This appears to still not have been addressed. From 1949 to 1990 East Germany and West Germany were separate nations (or as Karl Dietz noted above GDR and FRG). That's excess of 40 years of unresolvable errors and inaccuracies for prime and classic films!

I think we should not seperate West and East Germany now because Germany got all the rights of the movies and other stuff after the reunion. So I think there should be Germany only

Germany may have gotten the rights, but a film made in East Germany is very different from a film made in West Germany, thus I believe there is value to adding that distinction of origin.

But it's not a different country I'm german and I see no reason to have two germanys here, a movie from Bavaria is different to a movie in Hamburg but it's the same country, even the actors are the same

I'd be all for regional distinctions as well. I'd love to be able to indicate that a film in the US wasn't made in Hollywood, for example, and Indian cinema varies widely based on region. It's not all Bollywood.

Yes but I really think that could be done with a keyword instead, the other way would be too much for a database, just my opinion

My point here is in dealing with release dates, the area on a map is not the same as a country; territory is not government. What is permitted in one territory may well not be in another. Release dates in communist nations and democratic nations my vary by decades, in both directions, yet this is a time-frame in which many of the classic films fall! This is precisely the issue when dealing with East and West Germany. There is also the issue of accuracy; I am very disappointed that IMDb can provide a level of accuracy in which we continue to fail.

IMDB is more accurate? I can't see movies from Ohio, Missouri for example, only from the United States of America, no Scotland or Wales only United Kingdom, so I think IMDB is not a perfect example