Day: June 10, 2013

Categories
My Films

The World Premiere Of Vanessa Hope’s First Film!

I am hoping the entire universe shows up for CHINA IN THREE WORDS at the Palm Springs International ShortFest on Saturday, June 22nd at 1030A for “This Just In“, a collection of six short films ripped from the world headlines of social change.  China, Japan, Korea, Syria, & the USA are all featured in the program.  The whole festival looks to be pretty amazing.  You better order your tickets now.

Not only did Vanessa direct and produce this short, but I had the pleasure of being the Executive Producer.  The short is part of Vanessa’s much larger storyworld project on

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Categories
Issues and Actions

Can You Save A Small Town Cinema?

I received this letter this weekend.  I don’t know the cinema, but it looks real nice.  I don’t know the letter writer, but I sympathize with his plight. “Public Cinema” sounds like it was a great program and will be a shame to be lost.  There are always many sides to any story, but this does sound like a tragic tale. Here’s Hope hoping for a happy ending.

Dear Mr. Hope, 

I am sending this letter to you as the Founding Board Member of the Sixth Street Cinema, a very small art cinema and media arts center in the town of Mariposa, just outside Yosemite National Park. Our cinema has been a beacon for American independent film and world cinema for nearly sixteen years, and has acted as such in the most unlikely of places – a small, mostly low-income, rural community, often a three-hour drive from any similar programming. Since 1996, we have occupied the second floor of an historic Masonic Hall that we converted to screen films, and filled the very important role of being the town’s only cinema. Before 1996, there hadn’t been a cinema in Mariposa since the fifties.

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Categories
Truly Free Film

From Out of the Wreckage, A Future Rights Model

by Andrew Einspruch

Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch recently attended the Australian International Documentary Conference and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s graciously allowed us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.

Film distribution is broken. Ask any producer who has ever felt that the amount they get for their work seems paltry compared to what others are making. For that matter, Peter Broderick has been saying this for years at SPAA Fringe.

There are lots of online film distribution platforms duking it out in the nascent VoD space. From the behemoths like iTunes and Amazon Instant to YouTube and Vimeo, to any number of small players trying to carve out a spot in the world. Andy Green’s Distrify is one of the ones actually making it work.

Green held an intimate session at this year’s Australian International Documentary Conference called Future Rights Model, and talked about how they built the platform. He’d been a filmmaker and experienced first-hand the frustration of getting stuff out into the world. For example, one distributor, when asked about making DVDs available for one of his titles, told Green, “It’s a small film. I’m busy.”

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