Well, I’m going to start doing a bit of writing on yet another web log, because I simply have too much free time on my hands currently. All that time that I would otherwise just laze about, eating freshly peeled grapes from the hands of my numerous servants…

It’s going to be a movie blog, focusing primarily on non-Hollywood films… The beauty of this is that there’s a ton of material, and there’s simply not a whole bunch of coverage in the field. There are a handful of print publications, which focus primarily on film makers, and a couple websites that focus on the “big indies” that are festival award winners, and stand a chance of getting mainstream release in North America. My theory is to focus on international films that are good films, whether they stand a chance of North American release or not. Of course, I also enjoy seeing mainstream movies, so I’m sure that some of these will squeeze in as well.

The initial theory is that the split will be 90% non-mainstream film, and about 50% of THAT will be English primary film from Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England, Ireland, etc.

45% Non-english non-mainstream
45% English non-mainstream
10% Hollywood, or otherwise “mainstream” films.

I’d like to focus primarily on feature length efforts, but I’m a big fan of animation and good shorts, so I’m sure to make room on the block for this sort of thing.

There are a number of films that achieve commercial success completely outside of expectations; Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Lola rennt, etc. I’m seeing similar movement from The Woodsman which isn’t exactly a feel-good movie, so we’ll see what happens with that one.

Anyhow, what I’m trying to do now is arrange for media access to screenings, which is a bit tough when you’re not in touch with the industry. I’m mostly just going with email at this time, sending out a couple press inquiries, getting on lists with distributers and such. This is great, but there are a ton of films looking for distribution that I’d be interested in seeing. As much as anything, I’d like to be able to write about good films that need distribution, and it would be nice to get in touch with film makers directly – you provide me with something worthy of writing about, and I’ll write about it.

Some places I’ve been paying attention to lately (some for quite a while)

• Atom Films
• Film Threat
• ifilm
• TriggerStreet

So, if you have anyone I should contact, email or call me. If you know how press screenings work in Vancouver; if they’re theatre or distributer run, let me know – I haven’t even got to that point yet.

I’ll be announcing where this film thing is happening later – it’s as part of a much larger group of web logs and it should work out well. I actually have a backlog of items for the site, but need to actually style the site a bit. Something should start appearing over there in the next 10 days…