New global indie film fundraising projects announced

The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) announced today exciting new projects and partnerships for its pioneering Cinema Reloaded digital film production and online fundraising platform.

Launched earlier this year, Cinema Reloaded allows filmmakers to directly connect with film-lovers around the world, in order to finance and distribute their projects through online crowd funding.

The first trio of films produced under the auspices of Cinema Reloaded will premiere at the IFFR in January 2011. The line-up includes the next project from American filmmaker Harmony Korine (Gummo, Trash Humpers), who will collect finances for his new film entirely through the Cinema Reloaded initiative. Korine joins previously announced participating Cinema Reloaded filmmakers Ho Yuhang (15Malyasia) and Alexis Dos Santos (Unmade Beds), both of whom have received more than 500 co-financiers to date and have started production on their projects.

Cinema Reloaded is linked to a crowd funding system that works on the basis of donations. Five euros is enough to become a co-financier of one or more of the film projects. From 25 euros, you will also be listed on the movie’s credits, with participating filmmakers getting until December 31, 2010 to finance their projects through the program. Korine, Yuhang and Dos Santos will also keep co-producers informed through blogs and video updates.

The world’s first online social network for the finance of films by donation set up by a film festival, IFFR’s Cinema Reloaded was born of a belief that film festivals, with their pool of enthusiastic audiences and professional contacts, need to explore and support this new way of producing and distributing films. Innovations in the film industry owing to digitalisation and new online channels are offering filmmakers, film festivals and their audiences new ways of financing, making, distributing and watching films. IFFR has been the initiator of similar groundbreaking programs in the past, such as the Hubert Bals Fund, an initiative providing grants to remarkable cinema projects in developing countries, and CineMart, the first platform of its kind to offer filmmakers the opportunity to launch their ideas to the international film industry and to find the right connections to get their projects financed.