The journey to Venice begins: Top 10 films selected for Your Film Festival

Today, we are one step closer to finding the world’s next great storyteller. Over 15,000 filmmakers entered Your Film Festival but only ten finalists remain, each with the hope of winning $500,000 to produce new content with actor Michael Fassbender, director Ridley Scott and his world class team.

During the past month, 3 million people got involved with Your Film Festival by watching, sharing, and voting for their favorite films. After tallying the votes, we’re excited to announce our ten finalists:

88:88, Joey Ciccoline & Sean Wilson (USA)
Bat Eyes, Damien Power (Australia)
Cine Rincao, Fernando Grostein Andrade & Fernanda Fernandes (Brazil)
The Drought, Kevin Slack (USA)
El General, Diego Pino Zamora (Bolivia)
The Guilt, David Victori Blaya (Spain)
North Atlantic, Bernardo Nascimento (United Kingdom)
Super.Full., Niam Itani (Lebanon)
Scruples, Adrian Powers (Australia)
This Time, Ramy EL-Gabry (Egypt)

The finalists will soon travel to Italy where they will have their short films screened at the historic Venice Film Festival. They will also pitch a new project idea to Ridley Scott’s production team who, along with the jury including Michael Fassbender, will ultimately name the grand prize winner at a special ceremony on September 2, 2012, in Venice. As part of their journey to Venice, Emirates has invited the filmmakers to stopover in Dubai for a series of events celebrating their achievement.

Join these filmmakers as they travel to Venice and stay tuned to the Your Film Festival channel where we’ll take you behind the scenes, tell you more about the finalists, provide special edition movie posters, and of course, unveil the winner.

Jonathon Youshaei, YouTube Marketing, recently watched “A Conversation with my 12 Year Old Self: 20th Anniversary Edition.”

Movies and TV shows now available for purchase on YouTube and Google Play

About a year ago, we brought you thousands of full-length feature films from major Hollywood and independent studios to rent on youtube.com/movies. Following our launch yesterday, you can buy movies and TV content from shows like Revenge, Parks & Recreation and Breaking Bad, and top movie studios like ABC Studios, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures.

Purchased movies and shows can be played back as many times as you like on YouTube, and on your Android device via Google Play. We’ll soon be bringing the experience to Google TV devices too.



Visit youtube.com/movies and youtube.com/shows today to discover and buy your favorite movies and TV shows, and check back soon for even more titles and shows in the coming weeks.

Jonathan Zepp, manager of TV/Film content partnerships, recently purchased and watched “The Walking Dead.”

70 Korean cinema classics come to YouTube

In the last few decades, South Korea has emerged as a powerhouse of cinema, with both Korean-made films winning global accolades and Hollywood remaking Korean mega-hits like My Sassy Girl, and, if industry gossip is true, Oldboy. Many of the all-time classic Korean films, however, have been hard for global audiences to get their hands on.

Working together with the Korean Film Archive, we now have 70 classic Korean films available globally for free on YouTube—complete with English and other translated subtitles. The films are all available at youtube.com/koreanfilm, organized in playlists by decade as well as by director.

Movies include A Hometown in Heart, made in the early years of Korean Independence; debut film of noted auteur Sang-soo Hong The day a pig fell into a well; A Coachman, the first Korean film to win awards internationally; and more. Many other titles like Aimless Bullet and The Barefooted Young are available in HD.

We hope this archive will keep Korean cinephiles busy for a while with films that have been too hard to find outside of Korea for too long.

Jae Hoon Jung, YouTube contents partnership manager, Google Korea, recently watched Woman of Fire.

Michael Fassbender and Your Film Festival

On February 2, we opened submissions to Your Film Festival, a competition to find the world's best storytellers and connect them with a global audience. Created in partnership with Ridley Scott and Scott Free London, the Venice Film Festival, and Emirates, Your Film Festival will send 10 finalists, as chosen by you, to the 2012 Venice Film Festival where a grand prize winner will receive $500,000 to work on their next project.

Today, we'd like to introduce the newest member of the Your Film Festival team, award-winning actor Michael Fassbender.



Fassbender joins Ridley Scott as a Your Film Festival juror, as well as co-executive producer on the winner's grand prize project. This means that he and Ridley will work together to produce the winner’s next film project! With credits including Shame, X-Men: First Class, 300 and Inglorious Basterds, Michael brings world-class experience ranging from some of the biggest blockbusters to the most critically acclaimed indies.

If you haven't submitted yet, consider this your 1-month warning. Submissions close on March 31 at midnight ET. For more information, check out the Your Film Festival channel.

Good luck!

Nate Weinstein, entertainment marketing manager, recently watched “Kevin Allocca: Why videos go viral.”

Bringing the creativity of the Sundance Film Festival to YouTube

The annual independent film extravaganza known as the Sundance Film Festival is underway in Park City, Utah. For film lovers who couldn’t make it this year to meet to-be-discovered filmmakers and rub shoulders with celebrities, we're bringing Sundance to you here on YouTube.

Last year, we showcased past and present short films in the YouTube Screening Room. This year, we’ve teamed up with Sundance Film Institute to premiere a collection of films that are available for the first time for digital stream.

Films include Obselidia (Independent Spirit Award Winner), Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade (2007 Sundance Film Festival documentary on the arcade gamer competitions in the ‘80s), New York Times Critic’s Pick Lord Byron and 1994 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Award Winner What Happened Was.

To mark the last weekend of the festival, we’ll premiere Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie tomorrow at the same time the shock humor duo showcase their world premiere at the 2012 festival. This star-studded comedy features Zach Galifianakis, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and is already picking up buzz in Park City.

For the best of Sundance and thousands of other titles, get more into movies at YouTube.com/Movies.

Mildred Padilla, Movies Merchandising Manager, recently watched “Brick.”

Welcoming your favorite Disney movies to rent on YouTube

Today, the first of hundreds of The Walt Disney Studios movies from Disney, Disney·Pixar and DreamWorks Studios are coming to YouTube. These titles join thousands of full-length feature films from major Hollywood studios that already are available to rent at YouTube.com/movies.

Fans of animated movies? We’ve got the beloved animated classic, Alice in Wonderland and the newly envisioned Winnie the Pooh. Love Disney·Pixar? We have hits like Cars and Cars 2 all in one place. Up for a little bit of adventure? We’ll take you from the darkest depths of the oceans with all four of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, including the most recent blockbuster in the franchise Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.

So gather the family and friends to watch your favorite Disney movies at YouTube.com/movies. Check back in because even more of the great Disney classics and new releases will be added in weeks to come, including our YouTube Movie Extras with behind-the-scenes clips, interviews, and more.

Minjae Ormes, Movies & TV Marketing Manager, recently watched John Lasseter Talks About His Hawaiian Shirt Collection.

Recognizing 20 years of the Magic Johnson Foundation

On November 7, 1991, Magic Johnson told the world he’d been diagnosed with HIV and promised that “I plan on … living for a long time.” 20 years later, Magic proves that you can be an entrepreneur, talk show host, successful businessman, educator and more, living with HIV.

To show our support for all the work Magic and the Magic Johnson Foundation have done, we teamed up with Warner Bros. to donate a portion of the proceeds anytime you rent a movie on YouTube from the Magic Johnson Collection presented by WB. During the month of November 2011, proceeds from your rental will be donated to the Magic Johnson Foundation, and the collection includes Sandra Bullock’s Blind Side, classic inspirational movie Chariots of Fire, family movies like Lean on Me, and more coming in daily.

For more information on the Magic Johnson Foundation, its programs on college access, digital literacy, and its local centers in the US, please visit here. We’d also like to recognize YouTubers giving inspiration to the HIV community like Christopher, Rebekkah, Andre, Ben and others. To find out how you can learn more or get tested for HIV/AIDS please visit http://aids.gov/locator/.

Elizabeth Ferdon, YouTube Content Partnerships, just rented the movie “Space Jam.”

Life in a Day now available on YouTube

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world recorded videos of their lives to take part in Life in a Day, a cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From more than 4,500 hours of footage recorded and uploaded to YouTube, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott created a 90-minute feature film that offers an entertaining, surprising and moving view of life on earth.

After a theatrical release in countries around the world including appearances at the Sundance, Berlin, SXSW and Sydney film festivals, Life in a Day is finally coming home to YouTube—in its entirety, for free.

Starting today you can watch Life in a Day on YouTube, available with subtitles in 25 languages. So if you haven’t seen it yet or want to relive the experience that The Times of London considers “a thrilling piece of cinema” and the Washington Post called “a profound achievement,” now’s your chance.



If you’d like to own Life in a Day, a DVD is also available. You can find more details about this, and the whole project, on the film’s official YouTube channel.

Tim Partridge, Marketing Manager, recently watched "One Year Later: Cathy and Bob Linginksi."

Trespass with Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage is in theaters today, and at home on YouTube

Nicole Kidman, Nicolas Cage and Joel Schumacher. Two Oscars and countless nominations among them, this team is bringing you a new thriller called Trespass that is out in theaters today, and even more—it’s available on YouTube Movies in the US as well.

Director Joel Schumacher sat down to talk with us about what lead to the decision to release Trespass on YouTube as well as in theaters, experiences in the film industry and his cast-driven films, which you can see with our YouTube Movie Extras. As Joel says, “I know certain people in my industry are furious about … their films being shown in anyway than they were supposed to be meant to be seen [in theaters]. However, there’s no stopping technology.”



Trespass joins other YouTube Movies like Kevin Smith’s Red State that had a pre-theatrical release on YouTube, one of the many ways we want to help you get more into movies.

Elizabeth Ferdon, YouTube Business Development, watched “A Time to Kill.”

YouTube now has movies in the UK

Back in May we brought new release movies and more for rent to YouTube in the US. Last month, we took it to Canada. Now, over a thousand full-length feature films from major Hollywood and British studios are available for rent in the UK at youtube.com/movies.

We’ve got some cracking films to keep everyone entertained through the upcoming winter months and beyond. From blockbusters like The Dark Knight and Reservoir Dogs, to new releases such as Hanna, Fast Five, and Red Riding Hood, and even British classics like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you can find many of your favourite films in high quality available to rent now at youtube.com/movies.

There’s always more to explore on YouTube. Many movie pages also feature YouTube Movie Extras with free behind-the-scenes videos, cast interviews, parodies, clips and remixes from YouTube’s unique community of content creators. Over time we'll also be adding additional videos and features to YouTube Movie Extras so that you can get even more into movies on YouTube.

Britain has a long history of cinema, starting from the first moving pictures being developed on celluloid film in the UK. Now British film buffs can be part of the digital revolution too, at youtube.com/movies.

Matteo Vallone, YouTube Business Product Manager, recently watched “The Big Lebowski.”

Ten films from ten filmmakers under twenty-one

We love discovering new talent at YouTube, and today we are presenting 10 short films made by this year’s Ghetto Film School fellows, together with the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The culmination of the GFS students’ work is debuting on YouTube to coincide with a public screening at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

Over the last 15 months, the group of GFS teenage filmmakers worked with guest instructors like Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Amy Adams, Jason Reitman, Lee Daniels, and Ed Burns to hone their storytelling skills. Three of these talented filmmakers are leaving Lincoln Center tonight with $1,000 scholarships from Google to continue advancing their artistic pursuits, and here are their works:

"Former Self" from Remery Camacho



"Mama’s Boy" from Ralston Ramsey



"Upstaged" from Antonello Velez



You can also watch all 10 of this year’s Ghetto Film School shorts on the GFS YouTube channel. Congratulations to all of the GSF fellows for their hard work!

Minjae Ormes, Movies & TV Marketing Manager, recently watched “15 Years of Film Distribution.”

On its 70th Anniversary, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane Comes to YouTube

UPDATE 9/15: We now have the first 10 minutes of Citizen Kane available to watch for free. The preview is embedded below, and you can click to rent if you'd like to see the full film.

In celebration of the 70th anniversary of its release, Orson Welles’ seminal work Citizen Kane joins the thousands of movies available on YouTube.



What makes Citizen Kane a film worthy of your attention? Let us count the ways, and find more on the YouTube Movie Extras playlist for Citizen Kane:

• American Film Institute (AFI) voted Citizen Kane the #1 “Greatest Movie of All Time.” Twice. 
• Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland popularized the technique of “deep focus” which makes you see everything in the fore-, middle- and background in focus. You’ve seen it in movies ranging from The Shining to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. 
• Director Steven Spielberg is among many filmmakers who credit Citizen Kane as a major influence, and even paid homage to Citizen Kane in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. 
• You almost never got to watch this film. The negatives of Citizen Kane were destroyed in a warehouse fire decades ago. Thanks to a surviving positive print and digital restoration, Citizen Kane is now on YouTube today. 

To get more into movies like Citizen Kane, check out the YouTube Movie Extras that include commentary from directors like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, a five second take on the film’s most iconic line and even a puppet parody.

Minjae Ormes, YouTube Movies and TV Marketing Manager, recently watched "Bernard Herrmann: A Master of Movie Music."

Love, fear and car keys

As the world is starting to see Life in a Day—the documentary distilled from 80,000 videos submitted to YouTube from 190+ countries—many people have asked us how the film is structured. Woven into the collage of videos from Australia to Zambia, from the heart of bustling cities to the remote reaches of the earth, are responses to three universal questions: What do you love? What do you fear? What’s in your pocket? Check out some of the answers to these questions in the Life in a Day trailer:



To celebrate the one year anniversary of Life in a Day’s filming date, we’d love to hear your answer to these questions. So tell us, what do you love, what do you fear and what’s in your pocket? Upload a video to YouTube, share a photo on Google+, tweet us with the #lifeinaday hashtag and invite your family and friends to join. Let’s spark a dialogue and continue the passion of Life in a Day by highlighting the things that connect us across the globe.

For more information about Life in a Day and where to see it this weekend, visit the Life in a Day channel.

Raymond Braun, Entertainment Marketing, recently watched “Life in a Day Teaser #1: Slim Up.”

Tickets available for Life in a Day screening in 90 U.S. cities this weekend

Life in a Day, the documentary directed by Oscar-winner Kevin MacDonald, produced by Ridley Scott and made out of thousands of YouTube clips, has been inspiring audiences from the Sundance Film Festival to the Berlin Film Festival to the Sydney Film Festival.

On July 24, one year after thousands of you submitted videos to be a part of the film, many of you across the United States will finally have a chance to see the finished project on the big screen! Check out the channel for a list of the 90 U.S. cities where the film will play this weekend, ranging from Los Angeles, CA to Louisville, KY to Providence, RI to Dallas, TX.

Critics have called the film “ingenious and warmhearted,” an “amazing compilation of videos…[that] is one for the ages” and “a spellbinding montage depicting a day in the life of the planet Earth.”

If you don’t see your town listed, don’t panic. You can still vote to bring the film to a theater near you after its theatrical release on July 29 and the folks at National Geographic will do their best to get it to you.

This is your film, and now’s your chance to see a piece of film history!

Sara Pollack, Entertainment Marketing Lead, recently watched “Cobra vs. Mongoose.”

Life in a Day: request a screening, create a trailer and more

Today, we’ve got some exciting updates from editor Joe Walker and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald about Life in a Day, the documentary shot by YouTube users about a single day on Earth.

First, as we previously announced, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the film’s making, there will be a sneak-peek premiere in cities across the US on July 24, five days before National Geographic begins to release the film in theaters nationwide. If you want Life in a Day to play in your town, visit the Life in a Day channel and request a screening. National Geographic, in partnership with Cinedigm, will collect your requests from now through August, and will try to bring the film to those towns and cities where the demand is highest (either for the July 24 premiere or the following release).

Second, you can also check out the Life in a Day Trailer Remixer. If you haven't already seen the trailer, we recommend watching it. After that, go to the Life in a Day channel or directly to the Remixer page, where you can edit and publish your own trailer to share with your friends and the world. All of the trailers will appear on the Life in a Day channel, and National Geographic may feature some of their favorites at the film’s premiere.





One more exciting announcement: Life in a Day opened theatrically this weekend in the United Kingdom to critical acclaim! According to a critic from The Telegraph, the 5-star film is "Extraordinary…the summer's most inspiring film." For users in the US, don't fret: National Geographic is bringing the film to theaters across the country in late July.

Be sure to subscribe to the Life in a Day channel for all the latest news, and check out the Life in a Day Facebook page for daily updates.

Nate Weinstein, Entertainment Marketing Manager, recently watched the "Life in a Day Trailer."

Shorts From the Cannes Film Festival

Every spring, the Short Film Corner at Cannes features hundreds of the world's best shorts. Now, for the third year running on YouTube, you'll be able to watch 10 of the best, courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada's 7th Annual Online Film Competition.

How does the competition work? The curators at the NFB picked their favorite films from the Short Film Corner, choosing an eclectic mix of languages and genres. To vote, all you have to do is watch and thumbs up the ones you like. Voting is open to users across the globe. NFB will tally the votes and the winner will be announced at Cannes and on the NFB's YouTube channel on May 19.



Enjoy!
Nate Weinstein, Entertainment Marketing Manager, just watched The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger

Get more into movies on YouTube

Here at YouTube, we can’t get enough video. When it comes to movies, we’re just as excited: YouTube hosts a great selection of movie trailers and showcases a variety of independent films in our Screening Room; last year we announced the ability to rent movies from Sundance Film Festival; and this year at Sundance we premiered Life in a Day, a documentary film about a single day on earth filmed by thousands of YouTube users, produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Kevin Macdonald.

Today, we’re announcing another step in our goal to bring more of the video you love to YouTube: the addition of thousands of full-length feature films from major Hollywood studios available to rent in the US at youtube.com/movies. In addition to the hundreds of free movies available on the site since 2009, you will be able to find and rent some of your favorite films. From memorable hits and cult classics like Caddyshack, Goodfellas, Scarface, and Taxi Driver to blockbuster new releases like Inception, The King’s Speech, Little Fockers, The Green Hornet and Despicable Me. Movies are available to rent at industry standard pricing, and can be watched with your YouTube account on any computer. The new titles will begin appearing later today and over the coming weeks to www.youtube.com/movies, so keep checking back.

But your movie experience won't begin and end with a single film. With 35 hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube, there’s a sea of content that can add to your movie experience. Many movie pages feature YouTube Movie Extras -- free behind-the-scenes videos, cast interviews, parodies, clips and remixes from YouTube’s unique community of content creators. Movie pages also showcase reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, so you’ll see feedback from critics before you decide what movie to get into. Over time we'll also be adding additional videos and features to YouTube Movie Extras so that you can get even more into movies on YouTube.

Learn more about movies on YouTube or visit YouTube.com/movies to start watching now.

Camille Hearst, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched "300" and Matt Darby, Product Manager, recently watched "The Matrix."