In December 2009, The International Film Festival Rotterdam launched an ambitious experiment in film-making in the digital era: Cinema Reloaded allows filmmakers to directly connect with film lovers in order to finance and distribute their projects through combined online crowd sourcing and crowd funding. The participating directors of the first edition were Alexis Dos Santos (UK/Argentina) and Ho Yuhang (Malaysia).
The two Cinema Reloaded films
No One is Illegal by Ho Yuhang and
Random Strangers by Alexis Dos Santos premiered at the 2011 festival and were distributed online through various platforms. They can now be watched online on
youtube.com/IFFRotterdam (Benelux only).
The first part of the
Cinema Reloaded-project was to seek finance for the films through the festival’s loyal supporters and film lovers around the world in a crowd-funding plan coordinated through the dedicated web site
www.cinemareloaded.com.
Payments take the form of “coins” to be invested in an individual project. Once production has begun, backers, called "co-producers", will be able to track their chosen project, talk to other investors and to interact with the film-maker. For the film-maker, this is an opportunity to experiment with different ways to collaborate with audiences. “Cinema Reloaded is a bold, practical experiment that aims to test some of the opportunities of this rapidly changing time for film,” said Rotterdam director Rutger Wolfson, “This is not about finding the definitive business model but about trying to understand how the closer interaction between film-maker and audience, enabled by the internet, can benefit the whole of cinema.”
Visit
cinemareloaded.com for more information.
Ho Yuhang, Alexis Dos Santos and their co-producers at the premiere of the Cinema Reloaded films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2011.