PROGRESS was founded in East Berlin in 1950 as the only film distribution company in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Until 1990, PROGRESS exclusively supplied the approximately 830 cinemas and almost 2,000 other venues in the GDR and reached approximately 190,000 people daily in about 2,200 screenings.

After an eventful history, PROGRESS today preserves, digitizes and indexes an important part of the audiovisual memory of the 20th century and makes it available to the public on a historically curated platform.

The constantly growing stock of currently around 24,000 films and recordings from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day includes not only the complete film heritage of East German Newsreel „Der Augenzeuge“ but also other diverse collections such as Cintec; the contemporary witness archive Thomas Grimm; the "West German Newsreel „Blick in die Welt“"; the Catholic monthly newsreel "German Catholic Newsreel"; "Maischberger" at n-tv, as well as footage from the Deutsche Welle, the Vietnam Film Institute and US Archives.

Barbara Löblein

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