By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Wellspring's foreign matter; Tom Hall's art attack
Sarasota Film Festival programmer Tom Hall has the most lucid fury yet published over at Back Row Manifesto about the Weinsteinco-Genius-Wellspring death toll. The amperage is high. Excerpts: “I consider the closing of Wellspring’s theatrical distribution arm to be a death knell for foreign film distribution in America. There are already far too few opportunities for foreign films to be seen on our theatrical screens… The first [problem] is obviously political; we are living in a time when internationalism, connections to other cultures, diverse perspectives and ideas are considered… culturally irrelevant…. Most foreign films [shown] in America [are] dedicated to the idea that art should challenge audiences to examine their assumptions, well, there is no domestic cultural network that supports art, challenging ideas, or foreign perspectives. Where is the cinema culture in America? 
The second problem… is economic; we are talking about the slimmest of margins for these companies. The idea that a film company is migrating its entire foreign film distribution business to DVD and firing its entire theatrical distribution staff in order to save a mere $1 million in overhead tells me that this has nothing to do with Wellspring as a business or movies at all; it is about Wellspring as an asset… This is the complete undermining of the collective, theatrical experience which, as a film festival programmer, is something that I consider to be the essential component of cinematic pleasure. The idea that art will be relegated solely to a private financial transaction between an individual, isolated multimedia buyer and a smaller and smaller batch of media owners completely goes against the nature of what going to the movies has always meant…
“There is now a void, and while wonderful companies like Magnolia, Tartan and THINKFilm have all of my support in the hopes that they will continue to provide challenging, engaging titles, I can’t say I’m overly optimistic about the future of challenging and foreign film in America… Domestic film festivals are being priced out of the marketplace for most foreign product by foreign rights holders seeking €1000 and beyond for a single film. Tiny domestic distributors have clearly learned this game; many are now using no-profit festivals as a profit center in order to recoup money on tiny films that have traditionally benefited from playing festivals… Without little companies like Wellspring who put quality above money in order to make these films available to even the most marginal of audiences, I really can’t hold much hope that a great re-flowering of the 1950’s and 60’s foreign film boom will ever occur.”
