It was established in 1950 to handle the release of films produced by DEFA, the state-controlled production outfit of communist East Germany.

Since 2019, PROGRESS has been digitizing and making accessible the complete holdings of DEFA as well as a growing number of international collections by other archives which are being made available to the public on a historically curated platform.

PROGRESS took over this role in the early 1950s from Sovexport, a Soviet-controlled company which operated during the period following the Battle of Berlin in 1945 and the Allied Occupation of Germany.

Among them were Sergei Eisenstein (f. e. Battleship Potemkin[4]), Andrei Tarkovsky (f. e. Solaris[5]), Federico Fellini (La Strada[6]), Luchino Visconti (f. e. Death in Venice[7]), Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries[8]) and Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West[9]).

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, PROGRESS—on behalf of the DEFA Foundation—began marketing the entire collection of films that show a now non-existent country.