On Demand Weekly

Jonathan Sehring, President of Sundance Selects, announced today that Sundance Selects' digital sister, SundanceNOW, a new online destination for independent film, has launched "Doc Club," an innovative SVOD (Subscriber Video-on-Demand) program for documentary films. The company has turned to Thom Powers, one of the world's leading authorities on documentary films, to create a slate of curated titles each month for film enthusiasts.

Powers and the SundanceNOW team have spent the past year looking through the film libraries of several of the world's great documentary distributors, IFC, Zeitgeist, Icarus and Docurama, finding both many well-known titles as well as a number of hidden and hard-to-find gems. Subscribers may access "Doc Club's" monthly themed selections via streaming or downloading and can also retrieve the entire archive of previous months, as well as Powers' commentaries created just for "Doc Club" plus additional special materials.

Notes Powers: "I am very proud of the work I do in New York with 'Stranger Than Fiction' as well as the documentary programming I assemble for the Toronto International Film Festival and DOC NYC. I hope that the establishment of 'Doc Club' means that audiences across the country who are hungrier than ever for documentary films can now share my passion for these great films."

"This past year has been an incredible one for Sundance Selects especially with our documentary films. Audiences across the country and beyond have proven that documentaries are alive and well," said Jonathan Sehring, president of Sundance Selects. "This new 'Doc Club' via SundanceNOW will cater directly to online fans of documentaries. I feel strongly that any way a person can discover a documentary film is a great thing. With Thom's curated selections of beloved titles and hard-to-find gems, and his fascinating commentaries, lovers of documentaries will have a terrific new destination to explore."

SundanceNOW's "Doc Club" kicks off with an Errol Morris Spotlight. Films include THE THIN BLUE LINE, GATES OF HEAVEN and VERNON, FLORIDA as well as the hard to find entire FIRST PERSON series. The cost is $3.99 a month for access to 6-10 titles or $19.99 a year.

Films to be showcased over the coming months include some of the best of recent documentary filmmaking including BILL CUNNINGHAM, ART OF THE STEAL, MY WINNIPEG, BLACK POWER MIXTAPE, TOUCHING THE VOID and LAST TRAIN HOME; classics like WORDPLAY, ATOMIC CAFÉ and BROTHERS KEEPER plus some of Thom's favorite lesser-known titles that he hopes will discover new audiences via DocClub. These include Agnes Varda's THE GLEANERS AND I, the long unavailable CUL DE SAC, CAT DANCERS and DISCO & ATOMIC WAR.


About Thom Powers