budgeting for film series

Sat Jul 4 06:46:09 EDT 2009

Hi Sybil,

As Alex says, the Japan Foundation provide the prints, but you still have to contact the rightsholders to screen them. The major companies are generally very expensive - for Toho, Toei, Kadokawa (i.e. the Daiei back catalogue), you're looking at a $1000 per screening. I wouldn't pay this myself. It only encourages these greedy companies.

Nikkatsu are a more reasonable $500, which seemed to be the going rate for many of the smaller sales agents this year at Cannes, but this is all negotiable. The smaller companies are pretty flexible, depending on how many times you want to screen the films and how many you take from the same source. If you had for example, a program of 6 Seijun Suzuki, Shohei Imamura or Roman Porno films, they'd probably drop down to about $400.

And then if you know the directors themselves, jishu eiga filmmakers are happy to screen their work for free, just for the exposure, which is one of the reasons Yasutomo Chikuma's Now, I... ended up touring the UK so widely last year as part of the JF season.

And of course, there's other costs involved doing this sort of thing too. Shipping film prints from Japan is very expensive (about 500 quid per film to the UK), then publicity is expensive if you print up flyers, programs etc.

So the only way to do this is find a sponsor, get a grant from the Japan Foundation or similar organisation (we have the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation in London, who are lovely people). Depending on how many films you want to show, you're looking at quite a lot of money. For example, my Kihachiro Kawamoto tour last year cost about $5000 equivalent to mount, but I got sponsorship and once the prints were in the UK, played the films at about 6 venues, so it did pay off in the end.

Hope this helps,

Jasper

Midnight Eye www.midnighteye.com

Date: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 02:37:09 -0700
From: camford1989 at yahoo.com
To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: budgeting for film series

Hi, Alex,
And thank you for your reply.  What about the Nippon Connection films?  I need to have some idea of numbers.
Cheers,
SAT

--- On Fri, 7/3/09, Alex Zahlten <Alex.Zahlten at gmx.de> wrote:

From: Alex Zahlten <Alex.Zahlten at gmx.de>
Subject: Re: budgeting for film series
To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Date: Friday, July 3, 2009, 1:18 AM

Hi,

at least in Germany, there is an important difference between the film prints the Japan Foundation has in its local archive and prints it stores in Tokyo. The prints in Germany can be screened free of charge (in Germany) as long as you don't take admission fees from the audience, so shipping fees are the only real cost. For prints located in Japan, the rights have to be cleared first, and this might or might not cost you something, depending on who the rights holder is. If it's a former major, be prepared to pay quite a lot.

Alex

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Fri, 3 Jul 2009 11:23:25 +0900
> Von: Eija Niskanen <eija.niskanen at gmail.com>
> An: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Betreff: Re: budgeting for film series

> Hi!
> 
> I was involved in programming an animation series for the Finnish Film
> Archive. Something to take into account is that although the film
> print comes from Japan Foundation, you would, in many cases, still
> have to pay a screening fees to whoever owns the rights of the film.
> This ranges anywhere from between 100 to 1000 U.S. dollars per
> screening, and has to be negotiated separately with each film company
> or rights owner.
> 
> 
> Eija
> 
> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Sybil Thornton<camford1989 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > Greetings!
> >
> > I am helping write a grant proposal to establish one or more series of
> > Japanese films.  Could those of you who have done so based on films from
> the
> > Japan Foundation and Nippon Connection give me an idea of your budgets
> > (including number of films)?  I would be very appreciative.
> >
> > Sybil Thornton
> > History
> > Arizona State University
> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Eija Niskanen
> c/o Hirasawa
> Koenji-kita 4-2-10
> Suginami-ku
> Tokyo 166-0002

-- 
alex at nipponconnection.de

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