Where your lottery cash goes.....

[julian_craster]

Where your lottery cash goes.....





$ 371,195 to release Waltz with Bashir



$ 1,116 for Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley



This doesn't seem quite right......why should such a massive subsidy be paid to release a non-UK film - sounds like a gravy train for Artificial Eye to me !





Waltz With Bashir, Dean Spanley to receive UK lottery funding

Audrey Ward

20 Nov 2008 17:24



Screen Daily UK

http://www.screendaily.com/ScreenDailyArticle.aspx?intStoryID=42069



Israeli film Waltz with Bashir is one of the latest films to benefit from

the UK Film Council's Prints and Advertising Fund.



Artificial Eye was awarded $ 371,195 to broaden the release of Ari Folman's

film from 25 to 60 screens. The money will pay for national advertising and

an online PR and marketing campaign in the lead-up to its UK release on 21

November.



Icon Film Distribution was awarded $ 236,388 for Toa Fraser's UK-New Zealand co-production Dean Spanley, an Edwardian comedy drama, starring Peter O'Toole, Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill. The award will also widen the film's release from 25 to 60 screens and pay for a national media advertising

campaign.



A number of smaller awards of $ 7,426 for promotion were made to: Artificial

Eye for Erick Zonca and Camille Natta's thriller Julia; Vertigo Films for

Kenny Glenaan's Summer ; Park Circus for Bicycle Thieves; Drakes Avenue

Pictures for Steven Sebring's Patti Smith: Dream of Life ; to Revolver

Entertainment for Steven Sheil's horror film Mum & Dad ; to Metrodome

Distribution for Philipp Stölzl's North Face; and to Mumia Ltd for Marc

Evans' documentary In Prison My Whole Life .



Awards between $ 5,943- $ 7,426 went to: Artificial Eye for Agnès Jaoui and

Jean-Pierre Bacri's French comedy Let's Talk About the Rain ,Verve Pictures

for Raymond De Felitta's 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris ; Cinefile

Ltd for Jean Becker's Conversations With My Gardener ; Unanimous (formerly

Halcyon) for Jonás Cuarón's Año Uñ; and ICA Films for Shin-yeon Won's A

Bloody Aria .



Vertigo received $ 10,780 for White Christmas , the classic 1954 Christmas

film starring Bing Crosby. (why does this need a subsidy? )



The BFI was awarded funding towards the cost of soft subtitling and audio

description for the following films: $ 3,717 for Terence Davies' Of Time and

the City (previously awarded $ 71,957 to widen the film's release and boost

publicity); $ 1,116 for Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley and Pat Holden's Awaydays.

[Steve Crook]

name='julian_craster']Where your lottery cash goes.....





$ 371,195 to release Waltz with Bashir



$ 1,116 for Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley



This doesn't seem quite right......why should such a massive subsidy be paid to release a non-UK film.

Winstanley is a very British film, however you determine the country of origin of a film



$1,116 is just £750

That sounds like a bargain for doing the subtitling and audio descriptions for a 1975 film



But it's not my lottery cash so I don't really care what they do with it



Steve

[Nick Dando]

So Waltz with Bashir is nothing to do with Celebrity Come Dancing?



I thought it was going to be a video of Martin Bashir doing the tango, following in the twinkle-toed footsteps of John Sergeant.



How disappointing.



Nick

[jaycad]

name='Nick Dando']So Waltz with Bashir is nothing to do with Celebrity Come Dancing?



I thought it was going to be a video of Martin Bashir doing the tango, following in the twinkle-toed footsteps of John Sergeant.



How disappointing.



Nick

what a great idea!!-maybe we could get michael jackson (after a couple of glasses of jesus juice) to partner him and the lottery money could go on doing up the east wing in neverland!

[julian_craster]

$ 371,195 to release Waltz with Bashir



Can sombody explain why the UK distribution of this Israeli made film requires a

grant/subsidy of $ 371,195.....



It looks like, even if the film plays to empty cinemas, the distributor will make a profit, and that cannot be right.



Surely film distribution involves taking financial risks, with either losses or rewards.....



Waltz With Bashir (Cert 18)



Cast: David Proud, Dominic Coleman, Jason Maza, Robyn Frampton, Sasha Hardway

90 mins Directors: Ari Folman, Justin Edgar







Peter Bradshaw

guardian.co.uk,

Friday November 21 2008







Has Israel made a mass, semi-conscious decision to forget about the Sabra

and Chatila massacres of the 1982 Lebanese war, in which Israeli forces

allowed Christian Phalangist militia into Palestinian refugee camps to

slaughter civilians?

This extraordinary animated documentary by Israeli

film-maker Ari Folman - a kind of fictionalised docu-autobiography -

suggests that Israelis have indeed forgotten, in a kind of huge, willed

amnesia. But his movie makes an acid-trip down memory lane, and Folman might

have created his generation's very own Apocalypse Now.



Like that movie, it is open to the objection that the overdog's pain takes

precedence over that of the oppressed, but this is a fascinating and often

electrifying film in which Folman submits to his very own 'Nam flashback: a

memory of how the Israel defence forces, of which he was a part, effectively

presided over mass murder.



Over the past quarter-century, the massacre's horror has been absorbed and

repressed within the Israeli mind, Folman suggests, but only partly. The

very concept of Israel's partial or indirect guilt, established by the

government's own Kahan commission, and therefore a guilt which Israel can

concede without admitting to direct culpability, makes it a uniquely painful

and potent subject. It's a reproach drifting just beneath the surface of

memory and liable to break cover at any time.



Vivid and horrifying events leading up to the massacres are disinterred by

the movie's quasi-fictional "reconstructive" procedure, somewhere between

oral history and psychoanalysis. The film uses hyperreal rotoscope-animation

techniques, similar to those made famous by Bob Sabiston and Richard

Linklater. Live-action footage on videotape has been digitally converted

into a bizarre dreamscape in which reality is resolved into something

between two and three dimensions. Planes and surfaces stir and throb with

colours harder, sharper, brighter than before. It looks like one long

hallucination, and therefore perfect for the trauma of Folman's recovered

memories.



The director, in grizzled middle age, is visited by a guy with whom he did

military service. Over a beer, this man complains that he is plagued by a

recurring dream about being chased by 26 savage dogs, and explains how the

dream relates to the 1982 Lebanese war - a period to which he has hardly

given a second thought before now, but which has mysteriously returned to

plague him. Folman realises something that his friend can hardly believe: he

simply cannot remember if he was anywhere near the camps, and can't remember

anything distinctly about the war at all. He does not appear to be suffering

from amnesia, particularly, and neither are there definite, sharp-edged

holes in his memory. It is just a fuzz. So he goes on a journey to track

down his old comrades; he asks them to remember, and hopes these memories

will reignite his own.



His only real memory is no memory at all: it is a dream, a reverie, in which

he and his fellow teenage soldiers emerge from the sea and wade on to the

beach at Beirut: like a slo-mo parody of a military landing, or like the

evolutionary progress of torpid, amphibious creatures. His interviewees tell

him ferociously real anecdotes of blood and terror - the enemy's and their

own - anecdotes which put his dream into perspective. One remembers being on

a marine troop transport, where he fantasised about a giant naked woman

taking him away while the others were killed. Another tells him of a young

Palestinian boy attacking his unit with a rocket launcher in an orchard: a

bizarrely beautiful, almost bucolic episode. Another is almost killed in an

ambush, and escapes by swimming out to sea in the moonlit night, round a

headland, and miraculously rejoins his unit. How much of this really

happened?



Little by little, Folman sneaks up on the subject of Sabra and Chatila. Was

he there? Right there? A hundred yards away? Three hundred yards away? Or

nowhere near? His confusion testifies to the fog of war, or perhaps to the

fact that this fog is created as a way of not facing up to war-guilt. Or

perhaps it shows the individual's dissociation from news events, his

disoriented, perspectiveless feeling that what he sees on TV had nothing to

do with him: history was happening somewhere overhead or behind his back.



Finally, the film puts him right at the scene of the crime, and there is a

bold shift from animation to TV news footage. I am not sure quite what to

make of this shift, and have an uncomfortable feeling that it is an

aesthetic error, and a tacit concession that the animation techniques used

until that moment are lacking in seriousness: once the tragedy is directly

broached, they must be abandoned. A minor loss of nerve, perhaps. Never

mind. This is still an extraordinary film - a military sortie into the past

in which both we and Folman are embedded like traumatised reporters

[Mr Dean]

name='julian_craster']$ 371,195 to release Waltz with Bashir



Can sombody explain why the UK distribution of this Israeli made film requires a

grant/subsidy of $ 371,195.....



It looks like, even if the film plays to empty cinemas, the distributor will make a profit, and that cannot be right.



Surely film distribution involves taking financial risks, with either losses or rewards.....

UKFC does do some seemingly daft things, but this isn't one of them. You can read the policy on supporting Specialised Film Distribution through the P&A Fund on the UKFC website. The purpose of the fund is to widen access to screenings of both specialised films generally (from any country) and UK films which might be "difficult to market in the usual way".



Access includes provision of soft subtitling and audio description as well as increasing the number of prints in distribution, especially outside London. The fund has very successfully supported films like Pan's Labyrinth, The Lives of Others etc. Waltz With Bashir is one of the major festival successes of the year and offers a real possibility of bringing in a 'non-arthouse' audience for a culturally important work.



The scheme is well-worked out and there is no way it could be used to make money for a distributor by playing extra prints in empty cinemas. The fund aims to fully recoup awards if films prove very successful (e.g. Pan's Lab). You can download the guidelines to see how this works. The starting point for an application is that the distributor invests an agreed minimum figure on the release. The P&A Fund then allows a further investment to widen the release. If the extra prints bring in no revenue, the funding is indeed 'lost' (the money pays for the prints and advertising, not profit for the distributor). If, in the more likely scenario, the wider release means that the film generates significant rental, any 'profit' (i.e. rental income above the original investment by the distributor) is paid back to the UKFC until the award has been fully recouped. After that, the distributor can take its profits from the cinematic release.



The P&A Fund is currently £4million p.a. Yes, the UKFC team will make some mistakes and back films that nobody goes to see (who can ever say that they can predict box office demand every time?), but on the whole it seems to me to be a very worthwhile operation if it gets new audiences into screenings of worthwhile films.



The figure for Waltz With Bashir is large, so I assume that the estimation is that the film will take at least £500,000 at the box office. 60 prints is about right for a specialised film release.



I'm guessing that White Christmas might be getting support for digital prints – enabling one-off screenings not so easily possible with 35mm? (This would fit with other UKFC policies.) I'm a bit surprised that the distributor is listed as Vertigo – most re-releases like this come from Park Circus and White Christmas is listed for distribution by Park Circus on 35mm and digital on December 12.