LaCinetek

This dream began on a Parisian pavement in 2013.

As they left a meeting of the Société des Réalisateurs de Films where Alain Rocca, the president of UniversCiné (the first VoD platform of auteur films) was invited to speak about cinema and Video on Demand, three directors, Pascale Ferran, Cédric Klapisch and Laurent Cantet, started talking to him about the lack of a legal platform available on the internet for “heritage” films.

Evoking their difficulty of seeing or rediscovering the most important films in the history of cinema and the lack of transmission and exposure of these films on television channels, they started to dream about a site that would be dedicated to these films alone.

Alain Rocca then spoke of the project that UniversCiné had had for several years of launching a label devoted to the major classics. While they perfectly mastered the technical aspect, they still hadn’t managed to constitute the editorial leadership for this department: who would choose the films?

A few minutes later, the foundations of the project were laid: why not create a VoD site together that would be dedicated to 20th century cinema, where the films would be chosen and presented by directors from across the globe?

In the following weeks, the project was honed. The three directors would be in charge of contacting the filmmakers who would select and present the films, and they would come up with the cinephilic content of the site, while UniversCiné would handle the technical organisation of the service and its deployment on the internet. Everyone would work together on the co-publication of the platform.

The dream had become a project that would actually be realised.

This is what the LaCinetek team brought to fruition.

From the outset, there was a desire to open up the association as widely as possible to other organisations and other directors. This was how ARTE, the INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) and the Cinémathèque de Toulouse soon joined the association, followed, to date, by Lobster Films, Gaumont, StudioCanal, La Cinémathèque Française, The Pompidou Centre and the Deutsche Kinemathek, L'Agence du court-métrage, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium and the Slovak Film Institute, along with Olivier Assayas and Bertrand Bonello in their own names and Michel Hazanavicius for the ARP.

The legal vocation of the association, currently presided by Pascale Ferran, is “the dissemination of cinematographic heritage through the creation and maintenance of a Video on Demand reference website dedicated to the major films of the twentieth century, selected and presented by filmmakers worldwide: LaCinetek.” It is open to any organisation that shares its ambition and wishes to support the development of the service.

At its inception, it received considerable financial support from the CNC and the Région Ile de France which enabled the platform to be launched. Since October 2017, it was also supported by the Media programme of the European Commission.

These directors are :

Dominique et Fiona Abel & Gordon, Maren Ade, Dario Argento, Thomas Arslan, Olivier Assayas, Alexandre Astier, Jacques Audiard, Nabil Ayouch, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Emmanuelle Bercot, Bertrand Blier, Bertrand Bonello, Bong Joon-ho, Serge Bromberg, Jutta Brückner, Robin Campillo, Laurent Cantet, Leos Carax, Alain Chabat, Damien Chazelle, Clément Cogitore, Catherine Corsini, Pedro Costa, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, Raymond Depardon, Arnaud Desplechin, Lukas Dhont, Alice Diop, Pete Docter, Jacques Doillon, Albert Dupontel, Atom Egoyan, Amat Escalante, Pascale Ferran, Abel Ferrara, William Friedkin, Christophe Gans, Nicole Garcia, Philippe Garrel, Costa Gavras, Miguel Gomes, Yann Gonzalez, James Gray, Felix Van Groeningen, Robert Guédiguian, José Luis Guerín, Alain Guiraudie, Lucile Hadzihalilovic, Arthur Harari, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Jessica Hausner, Todd Haynes, Michel Hazanavicius, Christoph Hochhäusler, Agnieszka Holland, Christophe Honoré, Agnès Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Radu Jude, Aki Kaurismäki, Naomi Kawase, Lodge Kerrigan, Cédric Klapisch, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Gérard Krawczyk, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Bruce LaBruce, Joachim Lafosse, Nadav Lapid, Arnaud et Jean-Marie Larrieu, Patrice Leconte, Claude Lelouch, Caroline Link, Mariano Llinás, Noémie Lvovsky, Patricia Mazuy, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Nanni Moretti, Luc Moullet, Cristian Mungiu, Olivier et Éric Nakache & Toledano, Guillaume Nicloux, Michel Ocelot, François Ozon, Park Chan-wook, Christian Petzold, Nicolas Philibert, Bruno Podalydès, Corneliu Porumboiu, Lynne Ramsay, João Pedro Rodrigues, Alice Rohrwacher, Christian Rouaud, Saeed Roustaee, Ira Sachs, Pierre Salvadori, Marjane Satrapi, Riad Sattouf, Jerry Schatzberg, Paul Schrader, Céline Sciamma, Martin Scorsese, Claire Simon, Elia Suleiman, Bertrand Tavernier, Joachim Trier, Justine Triet, Jonás Trueba, Jaco Van Dormael, Agnès Varda, Paul Vecchiali, Paul Verhoeven, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Wim Wenders, John Woo, Rebecca Zlotowski

Each month a new filmmaker will be invited to join these affiliated directors.

The recruitment of directors, enhanced by possibilities fuelled by their cinephilia, is the key to the discovery or rediscovery of the films. It is our response to the commercial propositions, based on the algorithm of recommendations, which is at work today.

Short films, called “bonuses”, created by the affiliated directors, will provide exclusive content for certain films in the catalogue. They will present a cinephile’s perspective, to initiate or extend the discovery of cinematographic works.

1. The film catalogue available on the website is exclusively constituted by films chosen by directors worldwide.
2. Each director who accepts to join LaCinetek (known as the “affiliated director”) must compose a list of around fifty films, on the basis of his or her “ideal film collection” (the films “kept by the bedside”, the works that have helped shape them or that have had a particularly major impact on their own work).
3. These films must originate from global film production from the early days of cinema up to and including the year 2005 (short or feature films, fiction, animation, documentary, experimental films, and so on). However, affiliated directors cannot chose a film that they themselves have directed, their films can of course be selected by others.
4. It is the sum total of these lists that constitutes the catalogue of films presented by the website, and some of the films may have been chosen by several people.
5. The personal list of each director will be shown on the website, in the order freely chosen by the latter. It may be in order of preference, chronological order, alphabetical order (by title or by director), or not have any order (that is, a personal listing only understood by its author).
6. Directors may, if they so desire, accompany this list with a short text explaining all or part of the reasons governing their choices.
7. In the event that the rights of a film selected cannot be acquired, the film will nonetheless appear in the list, with a mention stipulating its status (such as “acquisition pending”, “rights currently inaccessible”, “film unobtainable”, “film pending restoration”, or “available soon”).
8. The list from a new affiliated director will be posted on the website at least once a month and will be showcased on the homepage of LaCinetek.
9. We will appeal to the users of the website to assist us, either by providing information regarding the rights of certain “unobtainable” films, or by notifying us of the existence of “archive” bonuses that they may know of or would like to see featured on the website.