We’ve been working with a lot of labs and government agencies internationally because of the exposure we’ve had in the US. ORWO has grown tremendously in the past few years. We had to figure out who we could work with and who would be innovative enough to help grow our industry. We launched ORWO North America on 11/11/11, and there have been at least ten large labs that have collapsed since then. ORWO North America has only been around for a few years, why start selling film at a time when so much of the industry is abandoning it? Is the business successful? It’s a growing process because the industry is such a mess … The marketplace has been shifting and we’re still trying to understand it. I connected the dots to LOC and from there we set up the consumer side. That’s what started us off in the US: Kodak couldn’t guarantee film for LOC, and ORWO was an immediate replacement of equal cost. I had connections with the Library of Congress and Kodak was failing, so I started working very closely with Ken Weissman at LOC. Eventually they reopened in the late ’90s as ORWO FilmoTec GmbH. The legendary ORWO Film company closed when the Wall came down in Berlin in ’91 because they couldn’t compete with all the other film companies. GEORGE CAMPBELL: ORWO’s been around in their modern facility since the late 1990s. JULIAN ANTOS: So what can you tell me about how ORWO North America came about? At a time when the future of motion picture film is at best uncertain, ORWO presents a welcome light at the end of the tunnel, and is one of the many groups working to change in dialogue from the wimpy “film is not dead yet” to “film is alive.” ARMS AND THE MAN, shooting on location in Rural Pennsylvania, will be the first feature shot entirely on ORWO filmstock in the US. For the past three years ORWO North America has been making black and white motion picture and sound recording film available in 16mm and 35mm to archives, amateurs, and filmmakers. On the other side of the world, Film Ferrania (a new company resurrecting equipment from the old Ferrania film factory) in Italy launched a $250,000 Kickstarter campaign (so far wildly successful) to reopen their film production facilities and start producing color reversal film–both 35mm and medium format still camera film, as well as Super8 and 16mm motion picture film.Įarlier this fall we spoke to George Campbell of ORWO North America, the North American sales division of ORWO FilmoTec GmbH. Nolan’s Interstellar will open two days early on 35mm, 70mm, and 70mm IMAX, and the Weinstein Company announced that Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight would see the widest 70mm release in 20 years (presumably referencing Ron Howard’s Far and Away). (Chicago’s last remaining 35mm-only second-run house, The Brew & View, announced its own digital conversion two weeks ago.)Īt the same time Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and others convinced major studios to place enough minimum orders with Kodak to keep film-on-film production a possibility for at least a few more years. Seeing a first-run movie in 35mm is now such a rarity that we drove all the way to Madison to see the Liam Neeson thriller Non-Stop on film. (We got a couple splicers, other forward-thinking institutions purchased what they could, and much was scrapped). Deluxe and Technicolor have closed their main film production labs and auctioned off all their equipment. In the past year, Kodak has announced the discontinuation of several 16mm stocks. Depending on who you talk to, motion picture film is either dead, floundering, or very much alive.
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