After giving us films like Drive and The Neon Demon, visionary filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is next launching a streaming service of his own, dedicated to cult genre films that have largely flown under the mainstream radar over the years. He’s billing the service, fittingly titled byNWR, as being “an unadulterated expressway for the arts.”
In an article he wrote for The Guardian, Refn teased the upcoming service.
“I want [the future] to be an uncontrolled place of beautiful chaos, where everyone can create their own universe and is free to speak their own mind, without being overseen by big business. A place of free speech and free access,” Refn told the site. “Over recent years, I’ve bought and had restored scores of old movies as a hobby. I wondered what to do with them. Then I realized I should share them for free, so I set up a website where they could be streamed. There’s no catch; you’re not being sold anything. Take it or leave it.”
He continued, “I hope my site will inspire people to see the world a different way. Setting it up has helped me reconcile myself to a different concept of culture than the traditional, romantic one I was raised with. People of my generation – I’m 47 – want tangible tokens of mortality to cling to. But nostalgia is artistic suicide. You have to accept the fact that everything disintegrates in your hands.”
The first batch of titles acquired for the service include:
- Night Tide (1961)
- The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965)
- The Burning Hell (1974)
- Hot Thrills and Warm Chills (1967)
Head over to the byNWR website to sign up for the newsletter ahead of this month’s launch.