Last night I was searching for a specific movie. I went searching for streaming services like Amazon, Mubi and so on, but there was nowhere to be found! Then I searched for a DVD and again I found nothing. Finally, I went through all the pirate sites that I already knew, and typed “Winter in Sokcho 2024”. I went on searching for about 30 minutes. A movie would come up, but the movie didn’t exist at all.
At that point, I realized that I might be the only person who wanted to watch this movie.
Then I asked myself, how many movies are lost like this? Maybe a copy exists somewhere forgotten, yet nowhere to be found. It was played in cinemas for some time though.
Have you ever come at this point? I will go with the book for now, the only thing that exits.
So many Canadian movies have been financed by public funds and then the distributors who owned the rights were sold or sent bankrupt or whatever and it becomes pretty much impossible to know who has distribution rights anymore and when you do they tell you there’s no public for it so it’s not worth spending money to make it available…
Hell, a local director was saying that one of her movie which had great success when it released is currently unavailable and the only way she could find a copy was through illegal means (on a Russian website or all places…) because a company bought the rights to it and is just sitting on it.