National Geographic’s Best of the World brand has long been the go-to authority on the finest food, experiences, and sights the earth offers. The globetrotting brand is now adding Emmy Award winner Antoni Porowski to its portfolio. Porowski is hosting Best of the World with Antoni Porowski, a series that will dive into destinations through the eyes of human stories. The debut season will feature four of the most culturally rich cities in the world — New York, London, Paris, and Mexico City.

In an exclusive interview with Collider, Porowski explains the decision-making process behind choosing the cities and activities, saying, “I know they wanted to lean into my perspective and how I experience the city and things that make me light up. You want to do the classic staple things that everyone knows and loves. It’s tried, tested, and true. But the best discoveries I’ve ever made are when I get lost on some little street.” Best of the World will explore classic tourist attractions, like Big Ben in London, but with a twist, and hidden gems, like Parque Ecológico de Xochimilco, a protected nature reserve within the city limits of Mexico City.































































Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?
Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country

Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

🐦Birdman

🪙No Country for Old Men

01

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





02

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





03

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





04

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





05

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





06

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





07

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





08

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





09

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





10

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

What Is ‘Best of the World with Antoni Porowski’ About?

Carlos, Ricardo, and Antoni paddle through the canals of Xochimilco at sunrise
Image via National Geographic/Jill Worsley

Best of the World with Antoni Porowski will have a heavy focus on food, given Porowski’s culinary background, but will also examine wellness, activities, and sights that often go unnoticed. Just because these cities are known for their elite chefs doesn’t mean that’s all they have to offer. Porowski explains, “Food can mean a Michelin or multi-Michelin star restaurant. But it can also mean a cantina or a quick little stop on the way that’s selling a little sandwich that not a lot of people may know about.” The four-episode season will take you down those side streets where shops are open 24/7 and haven’t locked their doors in decades, and restaurants that fuse cuisines from different continents.

New York, Paris, London, and Mexico City offer so many unique adventures that contribute to physical and mental health, and Porowski was determined to explore and show audiences ways to better themselves while traveling abroad. “Wellness can be a beautiful spa that you go to, not unlike the one that we actually visited when we were filming here in New York on Governors Island. But wellness can also mean cold plunge swimming in Canary Wharf in London, in the middle of the financial district, which was maybe one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” he explains.

Porowski reveals how the logistics of the show remain unseen to the audience, but are a crucial element. “I might be the host of the show, but at the end of the day, [there are] so many people who are there to make sure that the table is set perfectly for the scene, to make sure the correspondent or person we’re going to be meeting or interviewing is ready and has been prepared. I’m really lucky because, more often than not, I get to show up when everything is ready. But I always try to remember the people have been there literally for hours, actually weeks and months, setting everything up and getting locations and permits”, he says.

Antoni was raised in Montreal, a multicultural hub, surrounded by diversity at a young age. That upbringing taught him how to find calmness in chaos. “That’s where I thrived. I think that’s why that chaos, it’s not the mess itself, but it’s just there’s something about being lost in the mix,” he says.

Best of the World with Antoni Porowski premieres June 7 on National Geographic at 9/8c with all episodes streaming the next day on Disney+ and Hulu.



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