Shintoho genre film series

[Marc Walkow]

In cooperation with Mark Schilling and the Far East Film Festival in  
Udine, I'm currently preparing a retrospective film series devoted to  
exploitation and genre films from Japanese film studio Shintoho,  
specifically from 1956-1961, when the studio went bankrupt. It will  
feature a little more than a dozen films, and cover directors such as  
Teruo Ishii, Nobuo Nakagawa and many lesser-known others, including a  
large percentage of films never seen before in the West. Some better- 
known Shintoho films include Nakagawa's JIGOKU (currently out on DVD  
from Criterion) and GHOST STORY OF YOTSUYA (which has screened on IFC- 
TV from time to time).

We're currently looking for cinematheque or festival partners to help  
defray the costs of subtitling and securing the rights to screen the  
films overseas. If anyone out there is interested, please contact me  
directly. Title selection is still underway, and the series is due to  
be presented initially in Italy at the end of April. We're looking for  
North American bookings after that time period. Other European  
bookings are possible, but wouldn't necessarily go through me...

Like the 1960s Nikkatsu Action series I toured in North America a year  
or two ago, most of the films (all but one, in fact) would have to be  
manually subtitled via a digital source. And many of the films will be  
dual digital projection: one projector for the feature film, one for  
the subtitles. Unfortunately, the rarity of the titles and the low  
budget of the project make this a necessity; most of these films don't  
exist on celluloid any longer.

Marc Walkow
(NY Asian Film Festival, and others...)