Sign up for free and enjoy rare hand-picked movies by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn on byNWR.com, a new film-streaming platform that was launched today. The website offers “quarterly volumes of content divide into three monthly chapters, each featuring a fully-restored film”.
The first volume is titled Regional Renegades, guest edited by acclaimed biographer and journalist Jimmy McDonough. The three films in this volume are the horror film The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds (1965), the heist film Hot Thrills and Warm Chills (1967), and the thriller Shanty Tramp (1967). These films are presently available for streaming in India, the United States of America, the United Kingdom and a few other regions.
The introductory text on byNWR.com calls the website “an unadulterated cultural expressway of the arts”. The website sprang out of Refn’s hobby of collecting and restoring old films. “Over recent years, I’ve bought and had restored scores of old movies as a hobby,” the Drive (2011) director recently told The Guardian. “I wondered what to do with them. Then I realised I should share them for free, so I set up a website where they could be streamed.”
A few years ago, Refn began buying films made by old renegade directors such as Curtis Harrington and Andy Milligan, which led to him buying up the collection of Something Weird Video in the United States after its founder Mike Vraney passed away in 2004. About 200 titles collected by Refn this way forms the basis of byNWR.com.
The guest editor curating a “restored classic movie” every month will also create “original content themed around the film – essays, video, photos, music,” The Guardian report said.
The second volume of films, titled Missing Links, arrives in September, guest-edited by the UK-based film magazine Little White Lies.
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