This German-based site is a fun pay-per-view rummage sale of movies for Europe’s homesick
Even as someone whose job it is to cover the streaming scene, I admit I’m often stumbling through it as blindly as everyone else. Away from the well-publicised brands like
Netflix or
Amazon, there are many outlets I find more by accident than design. Such is the case with the rather unprepossessingly named Pantaflix, a site that had been in my peripheral internet vision for some time through hazy, lazy searches for viewing alternatives, without ever quite inviting me to click on it. A German-based pay-per-view film site founded by the actor Matthias Schweighöfer, it’s been available in the
UK for nearly three years now, yet neither its content nor its brand ever quite drew me in.
That changed a couple of weeks ago: for an unrelated project I was seeking out the early documentary shorts of late Polish master Krzysztof Kieślowski, and finding them rather hard to track down online – only to find them streaming, seemingly exclusively, at Pantaflix, where they’re splashily billed as a top attraction on the homepage.