Introduce Yourself : Sydney J. Levine by Sydney J. Levine

I have been in the international film business since 1975. Currently I am a writer of the popular blog on international film business, SydneysBuzz, in Indiewire until May 10 and also running on IMDbPro and IMDb since 2008 when Amazon acquired my twenty-five year old company FilmFinders. In 1988 I created FilmFinders, the industry’s first database of worldwide features used by distributors, sales agents and festival programmers acquiring features. It became industry standard for organizing and tracking the rights-buying activities of the film business and was adopted by the Cannes Marché and developed into what today is called Cinando.com. My partner, Peter Belsito and I continue to provide consulting and strategic planning for producers, national film organizations and other educational initiatives in international film business at Cannes, Toronto, Sundance, Germany's Deutsche Welle Akademie, Talents in Berlin, Sarajevo, and Guadalajara, EICTV the international film school in Los Banos, Cuba, Chapman University, UCLA Extension, Vilnius University, et. al. We organize, moderate and participate in panel discussions on the international film business, as well as produce research and reports on SydneysBuzz.com. I also work with the markets in Cannes and Berlin in administering buyers’ data for North America, Latin America and Asia and I give tours of the markets to newcomers. We open the Cannes Shorts Corner with a presentation on The International Film Circuit. I have currently completed a book about Latin American Film Financing published in Spanish by the Guadalajara University Press. The English version on the Iberoamerican Film Business will be published in the fall of 2016. Happy to meet everyone!