Netflix, “Tales from the Golden Age” or local is the head that wears the streaming crown.

I’ve always intuited that some of the growth of streaming giants would be fuelled by accessing, distributing, and producing talent outside of the traditional powerhouse regions and showcasing it on the global stage. Discovering this weekend that Netflix is already distributing ~ 20 Romanian films did not only confirm my hunches, but also filled me with the pride that at least some of our homegrown talent would get additional international coverage and recognition, and hopefully paint a fuller picture of the Romanian narrative around the world.

This talent, already acclaimed at the Cannes Film Festival or The Berlinale, is often referred to as “the Romanian Nouveau Vague”, a generation of filmmakers that shone a nuanced light on the stories of Communist and contemporary Romania and brought them to the fore. It is the generation of directors Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu, among others, of films such as “The Death of Mr Lăzărescu”, “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days” and “Tales from the Golden Age”, of tragedy, drama and comedy coming to life on screen, re-enacting realities lived by some and old wives’ tales for others, helping some remember and others – to learn.

The additional beauty of seeing these productions distributed through Netflix is giving this global streaming giant a local appeal and me the ability to chill, if you’d like, in my own language. A priceless feeling for me, a Romanian expat in London, with an education that is anglophone and content consumption habits that have almost always exclusively been oriented towards the UK and the US. Accessing home-grown content away from home goes a long way in terms of reminding me of my non-expat identity, who I also am when I don’t live on this island, my mother culture, and its idiosyncrasies, and shortening the distance gap I sometimes feel when I’m away from my homeland. It’s an emotional string that Netflix can pull and translate into a surplus of hours I spend on their platform at the moment and heightened goodwill towards them, just as I felt their algorithm was serving me the same options and they were starting to feel like “same old, same old” to the point that I was asking myself whyever I was holding on to my subscription.

At the same time, the expat and traveller in me (and sometimes the former student of foreign languages at the University of Bucharest) still craves content in languages I’ve spent a lot of time studying and exploring and in this regard productions such as “Lupin” (a Netflix original produced in France) or “Barbaren” (“Barbarians”, a Netflix original produced in Germany) play well into the sweet spot of providing entertainment, education, and exposure to cultures other than my own. While it may be healthy to remember one’s roots, it is also healthy to remember that there are multiple cultural viewpoints out there to consider and with 209 million subscribers in Q2 2021, Netflix well placed to enable this type of dialogue.

In the battle of giants, where Apple TV has the allure of its mother ship and an impressive star roster and Prime needs to build up an experience at least from this user’s perspective, it might just be that Netflix retains its streaming crown by continuing to tap into the talent across markets, the local stories and narratives, and emotions associated with them, and giving them a global platform through distribution and production. It would facilitate growth, the plurality of content out there, as well as the better understanding of the cultures that live next door. It would evolve the placement of Netflix from a streaming company and content creator to a culture creator, a pretty enviable and defensible position for any global super-brand.