Seven NFB shorts will be featured on YouTube's new channel The Screening Room, which offers viewers a selection of the best international animated shorts. The first NFB gem to screen on the video sharing Web site will be the 2007 Oscar winner THE DANISH POET by Torill Kove, who attended the launch in Los Angeles yesterday evening.
The selected NFB animated shorts will screen starting today on www.youtube.com/ytscreeningroom, each for six consecutive weeks.
Kove's Oscar winner kicks off the program, followed on July 18 by Chris Landreth's RYAN (2004), also an Oscar winner. Can we trace the chain of events that lead to our own birth? Is our existence just coincidence? Do little things matter? The narrator of THE DANISH POET considers these questions as we follow Kasper, a poet whose creative well has run dry, on a holiday to Norway to meet the famous writer, Sigrid Undset. RYAN is a veritable "animated documentary" inspired by the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who 30 years ago at the NFB made some of the greatest films of his era.
At the last Cannes Film Festival, the National Film Board of Canada in association with the Short Film Corner and YouTube presented the highly successful fourth edition of the Cannes 2008 Online Competition. Traffic to the site screening the nine finalists' short films from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Mexico, the U.S. and Canada was double last year's.
The winning film, HISTORIA DE UN LETRERO (THE STORY OF A SIGN), by Mexican Alonso Alvarez Barreda, can be seen until June 20 in English at www.nfb.ca/cannes or www.youtube.com/nfb and in French at www.onf.ca/cannes or www.youtube.com/onf.
YouTube and the NFB have also launched the two channels www.youtube.com/nfb and www.youtube.com/onf, which are screening trailers and clips from new documentaries and animations.
