NEW YORK — YouTube is launching a film festival that will play out online and ultimately send 10 finalists to the Venice Film Festival.

The Google Inc.-owned video site announced Thursday Jan 19th that Your Film Festival will take submissions of short films up to 15 minutes in length between Feb. 2 and March 31. Fifty semi-finalists will be selected by Scott Free Productions, Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company.

Those 50 films will form a channel on YouTube: www.YouTube.com/yourfilmfestival. There, users will be able to view the films and vote for their favorites.

The 10 finalists will be flown to the 69th annual Venice Film Festival, where their films will be screened in August. Ridley Scott will lead a jury in selecting a winner, who will receive a $500,000 grant from YouTube to produce a work with Scott Free.

 See video below and more details at http://www.youtube.com/user/yourfilmfestival

(Variety – Jan 19th) Slamdance, launched 18 years ago as a renegade alternate to Sundance, is opening Friday amid bright prospects as filmmakers take advantage of lower costs of production.

“I think that modern technology is playing a very positive role for low-budget filmmaking,” notes Slamdance prexy and co-founder Peter Baxter. “Cameras are more affordable and filmmakers can spend a lot more time in the editing room. You’ll really see it in the strength of performances in the narrative section this year.”

Baxter said the new crop of narrative films has accelerated in quality this year. “We’ve had very strong documentaries in recent years but this year we are seeing very strong directing voices in the narrative entries,” he added.

The Slamdance competition lineup has 10 narrative films and eight docs — including 13 world premieres — culled from nearly 5,000 submissions and reserved for first time feature directors working with budgets under $1 million. Slamdance will run through Thursday at Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn.

Narrative titles already generating buzz are “Bindlestiffs,” directed by Andrew Edison; “Heavy Girls,” directed by Axel Ranisch, and “OK, Good,” directed by Daniel Martinico. Documentaries that have gained pre-festival notice include “We Are Legion: The Story of Hacktivists,” directed and written by Brian Knappenberger;”Getting Up,” directed by Caskey Ebeling; and “Kelly,” directed by James Stenson;

Breakout hits from previous fests have included “Mad Hot Ballroom” in 2005, Seth Gordon’s “The King of Kong” in 2007 and Oren Peli’s “Paranormal Activity” in 2008. Some of the filmmakers first discovered at Slamdance include Chris Nolan (“Following,” 1998), Marc Forster (“Loungers,” 1996), Jared Hess via a short version of “Napoleon Dynamite,” and Lynne Shelton (“We Go Way Back,” 2006).

Peli, who’s on a promo tour of his upcoming ABC series “The River,” told Variety that his Slamdance experience — when “Paranormal Activity” screened in January 2008 — was unforgettable.

“It was kind of overwhelming for someone with no real connections to Hollywood,” Peli noted. “To get that kind of recognition from people who are really interested in films was just so exciting. What I’d like to do sometime is just go back to Slamdance and enjoy it as a fan, which is obviously not going to happen this year.

Writer Dave McNary

The nominations for the 32nd Annual Genie Awards were announced by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television on Jan 17th, with a simultaneous news conferences in Toronto and Montreal. The 32nd Annual Genie Awards will be broadcast on Thursday, March 8 at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Television.

Director Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore received 13 nominations and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method received 11 nominations—both films are nominated for Best Motion Picture and Achievement in Direction.

Rounding out the Best Motion Picture category are the awardwinning Monsieur Lazhar; the suspenseful The Whistleblower and the crowd-pleaser Starbuck.

BEST MOTION PICTURE
A DANGEROUS METHOD – Martin Katz, Marco Mehlitz, Jeremy Thomas
CAFÉ DE FLORE – Pierre Even, Marie-Claude Poulin, Jean-Marc Vallée
MONSIEUR LAZHAR РLuc D̩ry, Kim McCraw
STARBUCK РAndr̩ Rouleau
THE WHISTLEBLOWER – Christina Piovesan, Celine Rattray

ACHIEVEMENT IN DIRECTION 
DAVID CRONENBERG – A Dangerous Method
STEVEN SILVER – The Bang Bang Club
JEAN-MARC VALLÉE – Café de Flore
PHILIPPE FALARDEAU – Monsieur Lazhar
LARYSA KONDRACKI – The Whistleblower

The full list of nominees are locate at Hye’s Musings Blog   http://hyemusings.blogspot.com/2012/01/32nd-genie-awards-nominees.html

The Case For Being Anti-Anti-Piracy by Peter Bart VARIETY Online

I know it’s wrongheaded, but I’m beginning to be anti-anti-piracy.

Wherever you turn these days, the anti-piracy mafia has become ever more shrill. There’s a new White House initiative, there are new bills in the House and Senate — and then, of course, there are Hollywood’s awards-season screeners. The DVDs sent to voters do not begin with a cheerful invitation to enjoy the film, but rather with a litany of legal threats that each year grow longer and more dire.

Talk to the anti-piracy professionals, of course, and they’ll acknowledge these admonitions consist of useless legal rhetoric. Each year, essentially the same percentage of vids end up getting pirated anyway.

There are growing signs that the copyright-protection lobby is pissing people off rather than converting them to the cause. Political leaders and the Silicon Valley elite all seem alarmed by new bills with virtuous-sounding titles like the Protect Intellectual Property Act — bills that, as the Wall Street Journal observed, could “strangle the Internet with regulation.”

The fear is that, if these bills pass, a single infringing link on a single page of a website could result in the entire site being shut down.

In Hollywood, the release of screeners each year plays out like a ritual of ambivalence. The studios want voters to view the screeners — but not really. They’d prefer we go to theaters. So would filmmakers, who resent seeing their artistry squeezed onto a TV screen. Even the Academy’s furtive experiments with digital downloads make filmmakers edgy because streamed images look more like standard-def DVDs than like high-def Blu-rays (the same for iTunes streaming).

I’ve been an Oscar voter for many years and relish the annual avalanche of screeners, but I nonetheless find the threats and admonitions tiresome. Further, a substantial number of TV sets cannot recognize the “enter” instruction on the vids that certify your “acceptance” of the threats, so you never get to see the movie anyway.

Historically, screeners have always seemed to drive the Academy to distraction. One year voters were even sent a device that scanned the screeners, but many were defective and were soon discarded.

For the studios, dispatching screeners is an expensive exercise — the whole production and marketing process comes to as much as $400,000 a film. Voters may receive a DVD and a Blu-ray but distributors are not supposed to send more than one screener to a voter.

To save costs, a few studios have tried to develop exclusionary lists of “retired” Academy members — those who do not pay their $250 annual fee and thus cannot cast votes. No one knows what percentage of the 6,000 Academy members is “retired” but it could run into the thousands as a result of the bad economy and the Academy’s AARP-plus demographics.

As a voting member, I still find it gratifying to watch a screener in the quiet of my den to admire the individual components of the filmmaking process — art direction, cinematography, etc. With that in mind, it’s doubly jarring to be instructed at the outset that I must break the screener in half immediately upon viewing and feed it into the nearest inferno.

I don’t like destroying movies. I also don’t like breaking videos in half (there must be myriad lawsuits over cuts and bruises). Finally, what if the voter wants to rerun a DVD just before the final vote to reassess a performance or even a musical score?

The anti-piracy zealots aren’t interested in aesthetic considerations such as these. They want to protect their copyright even if they have to badger you and send you to jail to do so.

Telefilm Canada is introducing a new system to measure the success of Canadian films. For years, the crown corporation measured the success of the films it funds merely by domestic box-office numbers. A new index will now take in worldwide sales, as well as give points to awards and film-festival appearances, and the ratio of private backing a film generates. by Guy Dixon.

Telefilm’s old system failed to account for international box office and DVD sales, to say nothing of factoring in the acclaim films receive. Such accolades have led to well-established careers and numerous jobs for actors and technicians, even though this wasn’t being officially measured, says Carolle Brabant, executive director of Telefilm.

For instance, according to older ratings systems, the 2009 Quebec comedy De père en flic – with a home box office of close to $11-million – was a clear hit. But the 2010 film Incendies might not be considered much of a winner with a box office of only about $5-million – despite the fact that it was nominated for an Oscar and won eight Genie awards, including best picture.

In fact, most Canadian films seemed to fall below expectations under the old system.

A decade ago, former Heritage Minister Sheila Copps set a goal for films to aim for 5 per cent of domestic box office – an attempt to rally Canada’s then-faltering film industry. But given the number of Hollywood films clogging multiplexes across Canada, English-Canadian films typically gross only 1 per cent of the market or worse. Quebec films do only marginally better at around 3 per cent.

And while Canadian films such as 2008’s Blindness often do very well overseas or in DVD and video-on-demand sales, these indexes haven’t been factored into whether they’ve been a “success.”

So, on Wednesday, Telefilm announced a new Success Index. Now 60 per cent of a film’s score will be based on sales figures, 30 per cent on awards and film-festival appearances and 10 per cent on how much of a film’s funding was private as opposed to public.

“The fact that we’re combining the cultural and commercial aspect into an index is quite unique,” says Brabant.

“A good example is [director] Guy Maddin,” she says. “He’s a true international star. His work has been recognized around the world. But his films are not necessarily reaching huge box office in Canada.”

And for films with strong overseas and DVD sales, Brabant argues that the new index better reflects the current reality of the film business, and helps to define what a 5 per cent box-office target might really look like. The industry is now multinational. Most large films have some foreign backing and therefore have some expectations of box-office and DVD sales overseas.

“We see it as an important tool to actually achieve that 5 per cent,” Brabant says. “Just having box office as the most important measurement was not sufficient.”

The new Success Index not only changes how individual films are measured, but how Telefilm itself is measured. Are they doing a good job of allocating public funds for films?

“It has always struck me, and maybe it’s from my background as a chartered accountant, that it was pretty unique in this industry to measure our success mainly from what we’re doing in Canada,” Brabant says. “When you look at companies in other industries – Bombardier or Cirque du Soleil, for example – these companies are not only successful in Canada, but they’re successful all over the world. I thought this was something that was missing [in Telefilm’s measurement].”