Acquiring Screening Rights — Tomas Barnes

I quickly realised as a member of the programming team that a large proponent of the work I was going to be doing was email based. The process of acquiring screening rights for a film begins with identifying the local distributors of the films which we would like to screen. This was sometimes a difficult process, and required making the right calls to the right places at the right times and then following up with emails and developing a conversation. The above photos are screenshots from my communications with Melissa from MadMan – who ended up offering us the rights to screening “A Girl Who Walks Home Alone At Night” and eventually a DCP copy for screening at the capitol theatre. But similar interactions were had with other distributors like Umbrella (who ultimately ended up sponsoring the event). This became a series of interactions over weeks where we provided each other with information for our eventual payment for acquiring screening rights. These interactions were drawn out, and sometimes I felt as if Melissa forgot that Seance International even existed, but these dialogues were always pivotal in the final result of the festival. Ultimately I acquired the DCP myself and dropped this off to the Capitol Theatre.

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