We are currently in the process of organizing the 5th CON-CAN Movie Festival. While only 151 movies were submitted for the 1st festival, more than 550 unique and creative submissions were made this year for the 5th festival. The number of participating countries has grown to more than 50 since the 3rd festival, making CON-CAN a full blown international movie festival. In addition to the growing popularity of short movies, this growth has been achieved by the support from participating directors, our CON-CAN fans who watch and comment on the movies, and the multiple companies and associations that cooperate with us. We sincerely appreciate everyone's support.

For the 5th festival, we have used free streaming and interaction via the internet to establish the audience awards. In addition, during the Preliminary Jury screening process (held in Japan), we will provide an opportunity for movie industry professionals and students aspiring to be filmmakers to watch the selected 80 movies and then choose the best 20 movies together. This sets up a forum where people who deeply love movies/animations come together and share their comments. We try to create new and original events that connect people from different backgrounds, which we believe is one of CON-CAN's major roles.

As our next step, we are making preparations to cooperate with movie schools and movie festivals from around the world to create interesting collaboration events. We want to increase the number of short movie fans throughout the world by taking advantage of the Internet to work with other festivals based all over the world. As always, our mission is to provide media that connect people soul-to-soul around the globe.

Finally, we have redesigned the CON-CAN website to make it more user-friendly and more fun. We will also be adding new campaigns to make the site even more exciting. We hope you visit often.

Thanking you from the bottom of our hearts.

May 2008