David Chiu

Another sign of the times - a new indie film site called The Auteurs is promoting itself at the Cannes Film Festival with a video competition sponsored by HP, Facebook and Flip. 250 people will get the chance to grab a Flip camera and shoot a 3 minute short film. The winner, as determined by a jury receives $10,000 cash and a HP workstation with a 30 inch display - plus you get to keep the camera. Don’t expect the resulting videos to be Cannes-worthy though since the Flip video camera is a small solid state consumer device that only shoots 640×480 video. It will be interesting to see how many people actually participate in this competition. I think this sort of stunt/promotion would be better suited to another film festival such as Slamdance .