News from The London International Animation Festival

[BenEcosse]

I found this http://www.liaf.org.uk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Paul Fierlinger]

Sadly, our producer still hasn't found a distributor for the UK and will not permit Tulip to participate in any UK events until that happens. On a happier note, Sandra and I have been selected as invited guest filmmakers to the EbertFest http://www.ebertfest.com/thirteen/bios.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia about this unique festival:

Selection criteria

Unlike typical film festivals, Ebertfest[1] does not accept submissions. Roger Ebert, the TV and Chicago Sun-Times film critic selects films for the festival which in his opinion are excellent, but have been overlooked by the public or by film distribution companies. All films are selected from those that Ebert sees in the course of his normal reviewing work.

The original purpose of the Overlooked Film Festival, as reflected in the name, was to showcase films that had not been given enough attention by the public, film critics, or even distributors. Ebert has cheerfully admitted that he can bend the definition of "overlooked" to accommodate any film that he would like to include, since entire genres and formats can be overlooked as well as individual films. The selection philosophy is expected to continue, but with the name change there will no longer be a need to come up with a pretext for including any film.

Also: In May Sandra and I will be giving a master class in the production of animated documentaries at the DOCAVIV festival in Tel Aviv, where I will be also doing jury duty. This festival is held from May 12th to the 17th.

[BenEcosse]

ok - will look out for it

[Paul Fierlinger]

Distributors seem to want to operate without taking any financial risks anymore. In the US the distributor is the best in the world for this type of film, yet they have disappointed us because they went into it with no money. There was no advertising on TV or radio and very minimal; almost not worth mentioning, in the press. We got top revues by 97% of reviewers in print media which never translated into sold tickets -- if I hadn't made the film, I would have never heard of it. Very few of us read the papers anymore; we have better information available to us over the Internet.

Our producer has been trying to avoid a repeat of this situation in the UK and so far found one outfit that promised to invest advertising money and when that never happened, the producer took the deal back for breach of contract. Actually I think this happened with two distributors already. This is nothing unusual anymore these days and therefore I have no interest in making theatrical features anymore. It's easy for me to say, because we have the World Wide Web. At my retrospective, which BTW I understand is in a small screening room so get a ticket early, they will be showing our current WIP and hopefully you should understand why I feel so confident about what I said above.