JF Waste?

[Roger Macy]

Dear Robert,

I appreciate the meaty posts from you, Aaron and others about the Japan 
Foundation.  They have been skilfully informative and filled many gaps in my 
knowledge.  But this, of course, is my point. It still remains today, on the 
London office website, as I reported, that the only information on "film 
loan" is under "funding", where most schedulers would not look.  And since 
it seems to offer only the loan of a print in Tokyo, excluding shipping 
costs, excluding rights fees, without any hint how to obtain, beforehand, a 
"loan agreement made with the relevant distributors ", it's not obvious to 
an innocent scheduler that anything has been offered at all.  It is 
certainly not obvious that the JF has prepaid or preagreed exhibition fees 
for many films, or that some are held more locally, or what vintage the 
films are.  The posts on this thread clarify that something useful is 
obtainable to well-connected academics and curators, but, in my opinion, if 
the JF were ever to begin to get substantial take-up of those purchased 
rights, they would need to reach out to a wider, and more provincial class 
of arts programmers, to whom the existence of the list is, I still maintain, 
a secret.

Roger