Nicolas Winding Refn Launching a Free Streaming Site

Nicolas Winding Refn has made it his business to change the world of film, or at least how the world of film is accessed through the internet. The director has announced a new platform, called byNWR.com, in which a new batch of curated film, music, video, and essay content is released quarterly each year. The best part? It’s free.

The platform will officially launch online in February. Each release will include a fully restored feature length film available to stream, as well as “essays, music, video, photography and other ‘cultural ephemera,’” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Refn unveiled the platform at the Lumiere Film Festival in Lyon, France. “I thought it was intriguing to come to the place where cinema was born,” Refn said, “And now we can bury it in order to give it a rebirth.”

The first volume of the series will be an exploration of the American South guest-edited by Jimmy McDonough. It will include a restored version of extremely rare 1965 cult film The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds, Joseph P. Mawra’s Shanty Tramp (1967) and a feature about Texan sexploitation director Dale Berry (Hot Blooded Woman, Hip Hot and 21).

Refn explained that the restoration of Cuckoo Birds was done in collaboration with the Harvard Film Archive, made with money “from directing commercials we don’t want to watch.” The second volume of the series will be guest-edited by British film mag Little White Lies and feature little-known works of American independent cinema.