Martin Scorsese’s Handwritten Foreign Film Recommendation List Is Going Viral Again, And the Backstory Is Even Better

A photo of Martin Scorsese’s personal list of essential foreign films is making the rounds again, this time shared by the account cinesthetic, and it is just as fascinating as it was the first time it went viral. The image shows a typed checklist of dozens of international classics paired with a handwritten note from the director’s office, and together they tell a small but charming story about how one of cinema’s most famous obsessives passes the torch.

The list traces back to a teenage filmmaker named Colin Levy, who once spent a year and a half making a five-minute short film starring his own father in his backyard. That short ended up winning a national YoungArts award, which led to a one-on-one meeting with Scorsese himself. Levy got a personal tour of Scorsese’s office and editing bays from longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker before the director complimented him on the short and asked how he had pulled off its basic 3D animation.

A couple of weeks after the meeting, Levy sent Scorsese a thank you card. In return, Scorsese’s assistant mailed him a stack of books and DVDs, including ‘A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies,’ along with a typed list of 39 foreign films meant to jump start his film education. The handwritten note attached to the list, the same one visible in the viral screenshot, reads that Scorsese asked it be sent along as a starting point for Levy’s film education.

The actual selections are where things get interesting for any cinephile. Italian neorealist staples like ‘The Bicycle Thief’ and ‘Umberto D’ sit alongside French New Wave touchstones such as ‘The 400 Blows’ and ‘Breathless,’ while Akira Kurosawa and Rainer Werner Fassbinder both land three entries apiece, a surprisingly strong showing for postwar Japanese and New German cinema. What stands out just as much is who is missing, since major arthouse names like Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and even Federico Fellini are notably absent from the list.

Levy has described the meeting as one of the most formative moments of his early career, and the experience clearly shaped how seriously he has taken film history ever since. He went on to share the list publicly years later, and it spread quickly once it hit Reddit, racking up a quarter million views in a single day.

The story has held up well enough that it now lives on Scorsese’s own Wikipedia page. His biography confirms that in 2012, Scorsese recommended 39 foreign films to Colin Levy, cementing the list as a real and documented piece of film history rather than internet folklore.

It makes sense that the image keeps resurfacing every few years. For a director as famously devoted to film preservation and education as Scorsese, a handwritten note urging a young filmmaker toward Murnau, Lang and Kurosawa feels less like a curiosity and more like a mission statement, one that still resonates with anyone trying to build their own film education from scratch.

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