The partnership will enable fans to watch movies from the 500-rich FCAT film library on the video-on-demand platform when it launches commercially in June 2011. The legal, commercial downloading platform, available worldwide, guarantees fair revenue to African filmmakers and producers.
"AfricaFilms.tv is very transparent and straight forward. It is commercial, but the focus is on the African filmmaker. Right holders get 50% of revenue, have online access to the back office and the cession of rights is non-exclusive," said AfricaFilm.tv CEO, Enrico Chiesa.
"We hope to provide the platform with 20-30 titles from our library per year," said Mane Cisneros, director of FCAT and added, "securing the rights and all the materials related will take time and effort, but we are convinced this is the right platform for us and for the filmmakers".
In January FCAT closed the selection process for the third Africa Produce - a forum between African filmmakers and Spanish producers, TV commissioning editors and co-production managers, the goal of which is to introduce African cinema projects to the Spanish co-production market. For this year's forum FCAT received 18 feature-length projects and 12 documentary projects, coming from 14 African countries. The most entries in the fiction category came from Nigeria (four) and Cameroon (four), while the most documentary projects came from Burkina Faso (three). For the first time ever Equatorial Guinea and Namibia applied in the forum.
Six projects will be selected by the FCAT jury and their directors will be present at the festival to convince Spanish producers.
Promoting Africa, Spain partnership
"We aim to continue promoting co-production between Africa and Spain. Two films, from Senegal and Mali, presented in the previous editions are now in development," said Carlos Domínguez, África Produce's co-ordinator.
Filmmakers from all over Africa can until 25 February send their films to FCAT's committee, which is in charge of selecting movies for the competing and non-competing sections of the festival.
At the same time African photographers can send their entries for the fourth PhotoAfrica until 1 March.
For more information regarding the application process go to www.fcat.es.
