Quiz question for movie lovers: What do The King of Marvin Gardens by Bob Rafelson, My Favorite Season by André Techiné, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and Akira Kurosawa's Ran have in common?

Correct: The focus is always on siblings.

The four works are part of the monthly selection of the French streaming service La Cinetek, which specializes in film classics - in a broader sense.

For less than three euros, subscribers can get ten films on a given topic: “Voyeurism”, “Borderline”, “Brieflich”, “Occult” or, as is currently the case and until April 9th, “Brothers and Sisters “.

The range is wide, as the four works mentioned above show, which can be assigned to the genres drama, dramedy, family saga and jidai-geki (Japanese historical film).

What makes things exciting is that all of the currently 1,900 titles in the La Cinetek catalog have been selected by at least one of the 102 directors who currently have a say in the programming.

You dive for exquisite pearls

The rules of the game are simple: each réalisateur associé undertakes to submit a list of their fifty favorite films when they are accepted into the circle;

own works as well as those from the period after 2005 are excluded.

The circle is half French, from Jacques Audiard to Agnès Varda, half foreign, from Dario Argento to the Dardenne brothers, William Friedkin, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Martin Scorsese and Apichatpong Weerasethakul to John Woo (including eight Germans and Austrians).

Adjusted for multiple entries, this results in an “ideal” list of currently around three thousand titles.

These are all listed on the platform's website, but not all are available for viewing (yet) for legal reasons.

You can spend hours clicking on the names of the directors involved,

to see which works they each cite as their favorite films.

Audiard, for example, names titles that even many of his professional colleagues did not know.

Film lovers love to make (ranking) lists, said Pascale Ferran, speaking from personal experience.

The French director is a co-founder of La Cinetek, alongside her colleagues Laurent Cantet and Cédric Klapisch and producer Alain Rocca.

One day, while chatting after a trade meeting, the four of them complained about the lack of classics available as on-demand videos.

This is how the concept of La Cinetek was born, which was launched at the end of 2015 with initial support from the Center national du cinéma (CNC) and the Île-de-France region.

The CNC supports the platform to this day, since 2017 seconded by the EU film funding program MEDIA.

The platform has also been represented in Germany and Austria since 2019, and in Belgium and Luxembourg since 2020.

The catalog there, however, is much smaller, seven hundred films for the former zone, a thousand for the latter.

Jean-Baptiste Viaud, the general representative of La Cinetek, explains this in an interview with the effort required to acquire the rights.

“In France we work with over a hundred legal successors and distributors.

It's relatively easy with big companies like Gaumont, Pathé and Studiocanal because their catalog is very well recorded and after the first contract every new acquisition only requires an addendum.

But sometimes I have to deal with a whole negotiation with a new distributor for a single rare film.

And abroad, because of the principle of territoriality, new contracts also have to be negotiated for titles that we already have in the French catalogue.

Since I am the only one in our ten-strong team entrusted with this task, I am reaching my limits here.

Above all, however, as far as Germany and Austria are concerned, it is often difficult to find dubbing or subtitles.

Arte, which is one of the fourteen members of the La Cinetek association, can help us a lot here.”

The consolidation of the branches in the four countries mentioned is one of the priorities of the platform – before opening up new territories.

In particular, the monthly subscription (unlike the rental or sale of individual titles not yet offered there) is to be introduced in Germany and Austria.

This currently has 19,000 subscribers in France, Belgium and Luxembourg and has greatly rejuvenated its audience since its launch in September 2018.

Half of the users today are under thirty-five, a quarter under twenty-five.

Nevertheless, Viaud is already in talks with film museums and cinematheques in Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia in order to enrich the “Trésors cachés” section with its more than one hundred “hidden treasures” between one and two hundred and ninety-nine minutes of playing time.

But despite all the changes, La Cinetek wants to stick to its two core characteristics that set it apart from competitors like the British streaming service Mubi: the "patrimonial" character of its catalog and the accompanying program, which serves to convey film heritage.

In addition to a virtual film club - in the latest issue Régis Sauder talks about "Chronique d'un été" by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin - the platform shines with Élodie Tamayo's sparkling texts on the monthly subscription programmes.

In short: La Cinetek does not scrape the bottom of the film ocean with a trawl net, but dives piece by piece for the finest pearls.

"Each film in the catalog was not selected by an algorithm, but by a director," Viaud clarifies - "by Bertrand Bonello, for example,

Aki Kaurismaki or Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

This makes us the exact opposite of Netflix.”