The Babelgum Online Film Festival Jury gathered in Venice for the first time to present and announce the project. It also specified some points related to the Terms and Conditions, the final version of which will be published on the Babelgum website on September 15th 2007.

First of all 2 points which are a little different from the press release posted yesterday (written before the Venice weekend, sorry about that).

Babelgum will hold NON-exclusive online rights to all accepted films for 1 year (March 2008 to March 2009) with the sole exception of other similar peer-to-peer Web Television services. Details concerning rights will be outlined in the terms and conditions that will be released on September 15th. Babelgum wants to give filmmakers an important opportunity to advance their careers without preventing them from further capitalizing on their productions, if they have the chance to.

The contest will be opened not just to films screened at international film festivals between January 2007 and February 2008 but to all films professionally produced during that same period. Upon the specific request of Spike Lee, film school students will be allowed to participate under equal conditions.

Other news.

As mentioned at the Venice press conference, a grand prize of €20,000 will be offered to winners in each of the six categories. In addition to that, Filmmakers and Content owners will also benefit from advertising revenue share. Details on this will be presented with the terms and conditions on September 15th.

Winners will be announced at a Gala ceremony likely to be scheduled during the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008. We’ll keep you posted about it.

Confirmed points:

- Entry dates: 15 September, 2007 – 15 February, 2008.
- No entrance fee.
- Films must be submitted by rights owners only.
- Films must be no longer than 45 minutes. Films competing in the Shorts category must not exceed 20 minutes in length.
- Submissions must be in English or feature English-language subtitles.
- Clearly offensive or pornographic material will not be accepted. See our policy concerning offensive material, here.