10/01/2014 - On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the Slovak Film Institute launches extensive film portal SK CINEMA

On the occasion of its 50^th anniversary, the Slovak Film Institute launched its internal database for the public. SK CINEMA contains vast amounts of information about Slovak films, cinema and audiovisual art. The portal is divided into three individual databases. The Slovak Film Database comprises information about Slovak and co-production films but also information about student, non-professional and television projects. The Catalogue of the SFI covers information on archives, documentary, film, book, informational and digital collections and funds of the SFI. The third database provides short factual, biographical and other information about personalities, events and companies.

SK CINEMA is a project carried out continually and is still extending its content. The SFI plans to include digitalised films and teasers. “Within the scope of the project Digital audiovision, the SFI information system will include software solutions for managing digitalised films that will enable to bind content, visual and audio descriptions of films in accordance with the timeline of their digital copy thus making its search more effective,” explains the coordinator of the project Marián Hausner.

The film portal SK CINEMA offers more than 17,000 entries on Slovak animated, documentary, feature and reporting films. The SFI catalogue encompasses more than 140,000 entries on film copies, photos, posters, flyers, articles, books, scripts, manuscripts, personal funds and others. The third database contains more than 75,000 entries on personalities, production companies, film festivals, film titles, etc. According to Hausner, the film portal SK CINEMA is “comparable to the best European film databases.”

The portal is accessible at http://www.skcinema.sk in an experimental mode and available solely in the Slovak language for now. However, the Slovak Film Institute confirmed to Cineuropa that an English version has already been implemented and will be available as soon as the work on it is completed (first half year of 2014).