About Moving Pictures
About Moving Pictures Film Festival
This is the festival's mandate and profile:
"Moving Pictures: Canadian Films on Tour is this country’s only touring festival of exclusively Canadian cinema. Our purpose is to develop awareness of, and promote interest in all forms of Canadian filmmaking in regions that had limited access to them. We strive to develop audiences for Canadian films, inspire interest in Canadian culture, educate audiences on the breadth and scope of our cinematic achievements by facilitating festival exhibition and film presentations where we encourage an on-going dialogue between the filmmakers and the festival going public.
Moving Pictures presents an annual curated program of films which include the genres of drama, documentary, animation and experimental, in diverse lengths (features, mid-length and shorts), and in the formats of 35 mm, beta SP and DVD. The rationale of the festival is to disseminate work by Canadian artists and to develop an appreciation of Canadian cinema as an art form and cultural product. The Festival is also committed to promoting artists, an increasingly important part of the mandate.
Moving Pictures: Canadian Films On Tour began as a three-city event in British Columbia in 1994. Building on the success of this initial venture, the festival has grown to include an ever-increasing number of venues and a consistently more diverse selection of films and videos. To date, Moving Pictures has disseminated more than 620 Canadian media art works in 83 separate festivals comprised of over 900 screenings.
Each season, Moving Pictures assemble a wide range of Canadian feature-length features, documentaries, shorts, children’s, aboriginal, experimental and animated films into a touring program. Working with Moving Pictures staff, each community creates their own unique program from this master list of available titles.
The society provides a “ready made film festival” in that the office in Vancouver handles most of the logistical details. We supply host community with promotional materials, media kits, website listings, posters, electronic press kits, film trailers and full administrative support. We also handle all exhibition contracts with the distributors, book and schedule the films, and arrange for shipping of all materials. If film guests are accompanying the festival, they are arranged for and paid for by Moving Pictures. The host community in turn is responsible for the cost associated with local advertising and promotion, film rental fees and the festival venue – and in return retains 100% of the box office receipts. To increase its support to short-filmmakers Moving Pictures recently decided to absorb the costs of short film rental fees and encourage venue partners to increase presentation of short media works at their festival.
Although each year's program includes work produced with the financial participation of funders like Telefilm Canada or broadcasters, the Tour also screens more challenging, alternative work. For some audiences in the smaller communities where Moving Pictures tours—and for whom their only year-round cinematic experiences are of Hollywood films in the town's single theatre—the program curated by Moving Pictures is their only opportunity to view our national cinema."