Letter of the President

Letter of the President

To all UNICA member federations – to all UNICA Film friends

Dear Film friends

A Committee meeting was held in the Alsace from 29.10 to 01.11.1998.

I would like to give some information about it and ask you to circulate the information to the members of your federation. Thanks.

It is pleasant to see that checking on projection times has had no negative impact. In two cases there was a discussion before the projection about the way the programme should be shortened.
The concept "world championship" triggered a discussion and after much debating it was decided that the UNICA Contest would be announced in the future as:

World Championship of Non Professional Film and Video Making

with an award of gold, silver and bronze medals, and special prizes on this occasion.

The reason for this decision is that the expression would be reserved for future organizers of UNICA Competitions.

The Committee would be pleased to see that, on the occasion of UNICA’99 in LAPPEENRANTA, all national programmes are introduced by a leader made by the country itself, as was done in previous UNICA contests. We think that it is indeed in the interest of each national federation to introduce itself to the audience. The maximum length would be 1 minute, in VHS or S-VHS format. There is no obligation to renew the leader every year.

The latest member which has gained entry is Chad, after the Committee examined the candidature and their statutes. The decision will be submitted to the General Assembly for approval. We bid Chad welcome as a new UNICA member.

Unfortunately we still have member federations that have failed to pay their membership fees for some years and this is a cause of great concern. As a consequence, the Committee has to make a decision that such countries would be excluded out of UNICA if the membership fees are not paid before 31.12.1998, after sending an ultimate reminder. I will inform you about the results of the procedure after this deadline. A real pity!

We have been commissioned on the occasion of the 1998 General Assembly to examine the proposal from Sweden suggesting that we take over the activities that used to be carried out by IAAFVF (Co-ordination of various film festivals). We will inform you about the outcome of the negotiations to be conducted in the near future.

UNICA’99: preparations are in full swing. Please inform your members and the potential visitors about this event.

Important notice: all participants have to fill in an individual registration form for hotel and congress card booking. This should be done on an individual basis, because the corresponding passport numbers )passport, not identity card!) should be entered. Only a passport can give you access to Russia (for the half-day excursion).

The Committee held long discussions during the meeting about the question raised by some of the films shown during the Zillertal 98 Festival, whose quality could be considered as outreaching that of standard non-professional productions. Such entries are an object of sharp criticism in reports about the UNICA Competition. We should acknowledge that these contributions are generally very good and raise the level of the Competition.

It would be disastrous if such films were not there; the point is however to decide whether such films should compete with "amateur" contributions in the "standard" UNICA Contest. There was a long debate about the possibility of marking this films with an asterisk "*" sign, just as for the "Jeunesse" films having a letter "J". In all cases, the author him/herself should decide about such an assignment into the category and should be ratified by the federation. Then it would be possible to take up such films -which still participate in the national programmes- in a separate list of awards. I suppose that we should now refrain from providing further arguments to this debate and give you the floor.

We would like you to respond before 31.03.1999 so that the issue could be discussed again on the occasion of the next Committee meeting.

There are just two more points that I would like to make as they have induced the Committee to organize this discussion:

Should a federation table a proposal concerning this issue, we would have to be prepared and adopt a clear stance so that we do not have to discuss the issue under pressure and we can submit our conclusions to the General Assembly.
Should the General Assembly, for instance, approve a decision tending to say that such films are not welcome, considering that "genuine" amateur films have no chance to succeed when competing with such films, we would run the risk of losing some good works and therefore some good authors too, and this would be detrimental to the level of films in a UNICA Competition (World Championship).

And finally a request extended to the national federations. We still have great difficulties with the duplication (copying) of video-films to be made for the UNICA Film Library with contributions from national programmes. This is why we intend to hold back the works selected by the Committee from the national selections. Considering that some national federations have drawn our attention to this possible solution, we can assume that your federation will also agree to this proposal. We suppose that the copy shown at the UNICA Competition is never the master copy; as a consequence, the federation or the author has the possibility to make another copy. Thus you will help us to provide best quality to the national federations when borrowing films from the Film Library.

Should you disagree with this procedure, please let us know. But we hope that you will have understanding for our proposal.

Dear film friends: as you can see, we spare no effort to come to find solutions that are in the interest of your federation and your members. Now we should also have information about the true nature of these interests and we ask you again to make suggestions about these questions before 31.03.1999.

Sincerely yours,

Max Hänsli

President of UNICA