By Ryan Keating-Lambert
Those who come to my Movie Barf Monday nights (or did when people still had a social life) will already be familiar with the gorgeous Edison Filmhub and cafe, and their quality selection of contemporary European festival films and classics. The current quarantine restrictions were the perfect excuse for the filmhub to launch EdisONLINE – the first Czech-Slovak film festival VoD service for only 155CZK, the price of a single cinema ticket.
Subscribers will be granted monthly access to the service, which was launched on April 28, 2020. The package consists of 50 films of mostly European production that won prestigious awards at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals, as well as 12 children’s films, and the access to online broadcasting of film channels Film Europe, Be2Can and Czechoslovakia (Československo) with hundreds of festival and archive Czech-Slovak films. At this point, only Czech subtitles are available, but there are a number of English language films in the archive, like Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer (pictured), with more to be added along the way.
Viewers will be offered more than four hundred SVoD films in the basic package along with 30 new titles added every month until the 31st May 2021 and will be able to stream films whenever and wherever, be that on a web browser or on Apple and Android devices.
Premieres and bonus content will also be a big part of the EdisONLINE library, as well as selected parts of film discussions by myself in the Movie Barf Monday programme and Czech film critic Aleš Stuchlý in the Mental Hygiene (Mentální hygiena Aleše Stuchlého) programme.
20% of monthly subscriber contributions is also donated to support cultural spaces affected by the quarantine and crisis, which includes cinemas, film magazines, schools, theatres, galleries and festivals.
“The ability to adapt will be crucial in the future. Nowadays, people and society change many times within a decade. Ten years ago, Film Europe was a distribution company. After launching its own channel it turned to television, founded the Be2Can and Scandi film festivals, and recently opened boutique cinema Edison Filmhub in Prague, as well as cinema Film Europe in Bratislava. Now we are expanding our brand with launching the first online Czech-Slovak festival videotheque. EdisONLINE is not a panic project for quarantine, the VoD platform was part of our filmhub vision from the very beginning. Therefore we found some advantages among disadvantages and the free capacity was used to fine-tune this platform,” says Film Europe founder, Ivan Hronec.
To subscribe or find out more, visit the Edison website.
Movie Barf 