French cineastes launch Le Cinetek directors’ choice VoD service

A group of French and international film directors and Meilleurs du Cinéma, the group behind video-on-demand platform Univers Ciné, have teamed up to launch a new VoD platform, La Cinetek, which will offer a selection based on directors’ individual ‘top 50’ titles.

The service, developed with directors’ group the Société du Réalisateurs du Film’s (SRF), has a catalogue of about 950 titles on offer from the early days of cinema up to the year 2000.

The project involves asking directors for their choice of the top 50 movies and making them accessible for purchase. The three French directors behind the SRF – Pascale Ferran, Laurent Cantet and Cédric Klapisch – have already received lists from 26 other directors – Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, Bertrand Bonello, Bong Joon-ho, Laurent Cantet, Costa-Gavras, Arnaud Desplechin, Jacques Doillon, Pascale Ferran, Christophe Gans, James Gray, Michel Hazanavicius, Christoph Hochhäusler, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Cedric Klapisch, Hirokazu Kore-Eda, Patricia Mazuy, Luc Moullet, Cristian Mungiu, Lynne Ramsay, Christian Rouaud, Ira Sachs, Céline Sciamma, Bertrand Tavernier, Agnès Varda and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Each month, a new director will be invited to make their contribution.

La Cientek is currently exclusively via the La Cinetek site, but the group behind the project hope to make it available on France’s IPTV boxes in due course.