With the final days of IFFR 2010 marking the end of Cinema Reloaded Phase One, the hard work begins now in driving finances towards the €30,000 greenlight. Nick Cunningham sampled opnion from around the festival on the groundbreaking project
Festival director Rutger Wolfson insisted that Rotterdam's commitment to Cinema Reloaded is long-haul. “We might have to reshape it a little but that is the whole point of it,” he said, adding that the initiative was an experiment for the festival as well as for filmmakers and audiences. “We have to think of what would be a good next step to ensure that it works… there are two sides to it. There is the side of really doing it and doing something practical, and there is the side of putting something on the agenda. The second part is fine. The first part? We need to look at it and see where we take it from here.”
Producer and festival programmer Madeleine Molyneaux (Montreal Festival of New Cinema) can see a similar application across the Atlantic. “If it were to be done in Montreal, you could target unsung heroes in local communities in Montreal and Quebec or longtime alumni of the festival who are there all the time but need to scrape together financing,” she commented. “There is something to be said for balancing well-known names and entities and then starting to incorporate folks that aren't so well known. People will be turned on and it will be the equivalent of search engines like Amazon that say if you like this, buy this. If you like to invest in Pipilotti Rist you may wish to invest in so-and-so. That means the unknown filmmakers could ride the coat-tails of the more well-known, so you'd have this diverse funding model.”
Not surprisingly, the filmmakers themselves seemed a little unnerved by the responsibility of having a couple of hundred production virgins in on the professional process. “The thought of people giving money from their pockets makes me feel a little ill,” pointed out Alexis Dos Santos (project: Another World: Rocky + Lulu). “I have an extra responsibility to all these people. Usually, you have one financier and their money is for making films and not for anything else, but this is like buying a cinema ticket in advance.”
Pipilotti Rist (Liebling) put a series of questions she hopes to see answered over the next year. “How much control can a financier or producer have over the film outcome?” she asked. “To get money for a feature, I had to write a script for the juries of public and private funds. Producer Hugofilm was in charge of finding finance. With Pepperminta, the producer and me worked 3-4 years for free. If I produce videos for an installation […] I am free to change my ideas anytime. If I do now make a short, financed and produced by the audience, when and how do I report the process? I am looking very much forward to be a active part in this experiment.”
Ho Yuhang, whose project still remains unnamed, expressed his ongoing satisfaction with the process. “The Rotterdam experience has always been nice, and is extra nice this year with the Cinema Reloaded project,” he enthused. “It's still very fresh for me. I wake up every morning and there is something new. The festival has given me inspiration how to continue with this thing and to continue to generate interest later. So far it has been great. When I go back to Malaysia I will communicate my thoughts with Rotterdam to see what we can do next.”
More about Cinema Reloaded here.