Written by Nic Wistreich
|
02 February 2010
Posted in
articles -
editorial
Sometimes it takes a good film to put things right. Like when your computer needs to be rebooted to get it working normally, or the benefits of a good night's sleep. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada was just that calibration, a tale of doing the right thing, of endurance and redemption, and a reminder that of how important cinema is to me, and how great cinema has far less to do with technology than it does to do with the questions, hopes and problems that face us as a species.
Ten years ago, on the second of February 2000, Netribution formally launched, after a month of tests, at Peeping Tom's short film gathering at Global Cafe in Golden Square.
It's hard to recognise myself in the photo from the night - alongside fellow co-founders Wendy Bevan Mogg and the legend that is Tom Fogg - bubbling with passionate naiveté and blind optimism. A more innocent time, before YouTube and torrents and Bush and 9-11, when David Cameron was still head of PR for Carlton TV, and publishing a new issue once a week seemed impressive. Now tweets come every few seconds I miss that space which was forced upon us in the early days by dial-up modems - the gaps between thought, writing, coding and the reader that might have prevented some of my more indulgent rants of later years.
I can't find the launch page of the site anywhere. The first front page I can find is pulled from the Wayback machine and is Issue #24 from May of that year, there's other front pages with broken links from Issue #47 (our 2000 Christmas issue), Issue #56 and Issue #62 which has more of the site intact. The old features page probably gives the best idea of what we were about then.
As I searched my hard drives to find our first issue, I found the first barely coherent business plan from November 99 through to the Netribution 2 presentation from November 04 which reads like a naïve sales brochure for Web 2.0. Even in 99 our plan was filled with talk of 'open source webisodes' that people could remix and add to across the world and a network of indie screening venues and groups across the country for filmmakers to distribute their work to directly.
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