The international streaming service DAFilms presenting successful festival and documentary films online expands to Poland and Slovakia. Under the domains dafilms.pl and dafilms.sk, local viewers will find an expanded film catalogue which now includes national films and strong international titles which will only be accessible in these territories. The platforms in the new language versions were launched on February 3, 2020.
As the numbers of Polish and Slovak viewers of DAFilms have grown, we decided to enter these territories directly and to create specific regional platforms with a focus on local viewers which will respond to current topics in these countries. “We started building the DAFilms platform with Polish and Slovak films fifteen years ago, as pioneers in the field of online distribution. Since then, we have closely followed Polish and Slovak cinema and are very happy to be now able to use our experience and build film platforms directly for Polish and Slovak audiences,” says founder of DAFilms Nina Numankadić.
Making films accessible to local audiences
The launch of the language versions for Poland and Slovakia will make unique catalogues of films accessible to local viewers, offering quality works of local cinema online. The dafilms.sk domain will be the biggest streaming service in Slovakia providing local content. “The interest in local cinema is growing, especially in documentary film. However, many films are no longer available to viewers after their theatrical or television distribution. We believe that this will change with the launch of dafilms.sk,” says project manager of the Slovak platform Dorota Zacharová.
The current films accessible to Slovak viewers include the acclaimed documentary Válek by Patrik Lančarič, the provocative and innovative film The Last Self-Portrait by Marek Kuboš, and Theodor Kuhn’s fiction film By a Sharp Knife. The program further includes titles by established directors of “Generation 90” who received international acclaim, including Marko Škop, Peter Kerekes, Jaro Vojtek and Juraj Lehotský.
The Polish version offers successful local films such as The Prince and the Dybbuk, which brought the directing duo Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosołowski the Polish Film Academy award for best documentary of 2018, and Call Me Tony by Klaudiusz Chrostowski, who received the award for best student documentary at Amsterdam’s prestigious IDFA. “Contemporary Polish documentary films garner success at international festivals, however, they are not accessible to Polish viewers. We would further like to offer exceptional international documentaries which only appear fragmentarily at film festival programs in Poland,” specifies project manager of dafilms.pl Mikołaj Góralik.
International catalogue accessible with subscription
Most of the films will be available for online streaming or legal download. Viewers can choose between a monthly and yearly subscription or a one-time fee for download. Subscribers to the national version will also get access to the international film catalogue at dafilms.com with 2000+ titles.
