We are currently in the process of organizing the 6th CON-CAN Movie Festival. While only 151 movies were submitted for the 1st festival, more than 580 unique and creative submissions were made this year for the 6th 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.

We have incorporated a free streaming and interaction system via the internet to determine the audience awards. This sets up a forum where people who deeply love movies/animations come together and share their comments. We also try to create new and original screening events, here in Japan, that connect people from different backgrounds, which we believe is one of CON-CAN’s key 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 global festivals. As always, our mission is to provide media that connect people soul-to-soul around the globe, which underlines our main concept: “The world is one big family”.

Finally, we have many well renowned professionals participating in this year’s movie festival as members of the International Jury. Our promise is to deliver high quality short movies that possess a strong message, worldwide. We are confident that all of you will enjoy the 6th CON-CAN Movie Festival and don’t forget to “Watch Globally, Think Locally”.

Thanking you from the bottom of our hearts.

 

July 2009