The Tribeca Film Institute has been working on the launch of a major project with Amazon.com to create a new digital marketplace for precious film and video works that have languished in archives, have extremely limited distribution, or have just been plain hard to find. At last, Re:Frame is here.
As of yesterday, the service is now active through Reframecollection.org and I am happy to say that I will soon be one of the film curator/bloggers contributing regularly on the new site, specializing in hybrid nonfiction works and contributing a series of interviews with this year's TFI Fellows. The core audiences are the educational and institutional markets, but I know there are many film fans out there whose taste goes beyond what even Netflix can provide. Right now, about 500 works live on the site, from some of Sally Potter's works, to hard-to-find documentaries and experimental fare.
The service will be a nonprofit storefront for both short- and long-form film works, as well as providing rights holders a way to sell or rent downloads or DVDs through Amazon. What really distinguishes the Re:Frame model is that it offers services to convert all works to a digital format from video free of charge, and will also offer conversion services from film formats to digital at a cost well below what most standard conversions run. The digital copy is then returned to the rights holder while the work is retained in Amazon's archive. The rights holder determines what to charge and will receive royalty payments amounting to 50% of any download or online rental, or a share of DVD sales.
Over the last two years, the Re:Frame Collection project, under the auspices of the Tribeca Film Institute run by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal, has had financial support through grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. The initiative was established to preserve film history and to make classic and rare works available to a larger community of students, artists, educators and film fans. The hope is that close to 10,000 titles will be available in the next twelve months.
To learn more about the various deal structures for filmmakers and rights holders, and other information about the collection, visit the web site.
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