Reframe: Giving More Life To Films

Tuesday, June 10, 2008



So I was reading an article out in the NY Times this morning about a new clearing house for films that don't have a long shelf-life or aren't as commercial as say a Hollywood blockbuster, and it sounds like it could be cool service if they can get the number of films they want up and running and available on the Web for streaming.

I went onto the site to check out and see if they had any Asian & Asian American filmmakers on their list and while I didn't scrape through all of them I did see a few by Jessica Yu (Protagonist, In the Realms of the Unreal), Jiang Xiao, Yang Zhang, Edward Yang, and others.

Here's a quick clip from the article:

The nonprofit Tribeca Film Institute in New York is joining Amazon.com to create a digital marketplace for films and videos that have been stuck in archives with limited circulation or have been otherwise unavailable through conventional retail and Web outlets [...]

"We’re hoping to get that stuff off the shelf and into people’s hands," Brian Newman, the institute’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview.

The approximately 500 works initially available range from the works of the filmmaker Sally Potter, beginning with her 1979 short “Thriller,” to collections of little-known documentaries from various archives. Some of those will be available to purchase only on DVD, because rights are controlled by commercial distributors. But the service aims to provide about 10,000 works over the next year or so and expects to make as many as possible accessible on the Web.
Go the Reframe site here.