Speaking at the Annual General Meeting, the Chairman of the Company, Alton Irby, will say: “Today marks ContentFilm’s first AGM since its reverse takeover of Winchester Entertainment in March 2004. Inevitably the first half of the year saw management very much focused on the reorganisation of the merged businesses and this has resulted in significant annual overhead savings. We have also worked hard to open up new revenue opportunities in the production, financing and distribution of new films. The results of these initiatives have become clearly apparent since the end of the September half year. We have announced a partnership with a newly formed film investment fund, Entertainment Investor, which will enable us to exclusively finance and sell internationally up to US$80m of new film productions. Today we are able to announce a deal with one of North America’s leading DVD distributors, Image Entertainment, for the co-production and joint financing of three to four feature films a year. This deal is a further major step for us. It is expected to lead to a substantial increase in ContentFilm’s production output, and the first film will be announced shortly. Despite the focus on the integration of Winchester and Content and negotiating our new financing and distribution partnerships, we were able to complete the filming of “The King”, directed by James Marsh and starring William Hurt and Gael Garcia Bernal, and the film is now in post-production. More importantly we have struck a number of deals for our UK distribution and international film sales divisions. On 22 October we released the BBC Films production of “My Summer of Love” in the UK. At the end of August the film won the prestigious Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The subsequent reviews of Pawel Pawlikowski’s third feature film were no less glowing and the news from the box office is very encouraging. In September, we secured the international film sales rights to “The Business“, a film by Nick Love who earlier directed “The Football Factory. The Business” is currently filming in Spain. More recently we have acquired the rights to a major family adventure film, “Mee-Shee the Water Giant”, directed by John Henderson. We also learned in the last few days that Julia Stiles, the star of “The Bourne Supremacy”, “Mona Lisa Smile” and “10 Things I Hate About You”, has agreed to co-star in “Burns” as the poet’s one true love. We announced in May that we had acquired the worldwide sales rights to “Burns”, and with Miss Stiles now formally attached to the production we are hopeful that filming will begin early in 2005. We have high expectations for all three productions. To put the announcements of the last two months in context, I think three things are evident: * At Content we are able to develop a diverse production slate with films of higher budgets and worldwide appeal by being able to call on a range of sources of outside capital. * Our marketing skills are widely recognized and mean that we are able to acquire the international film sales and UK distribution of third party productions at lower prices than would generally be the norm. * We are also seen as producers of high quality films on modest budgets. In summary, we add value for both our partners and for other producers. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to bring our shareholders up to date with ContentFilm’s progress. All in all, I think we can safely say that 2004-05 is proving a year of real progress for the Company, and it is this confidence which has led a number of our non-executive directors to buy shares recently. We look forward to next year in the expectation of further progress for the Company.” ENDS
For further information contact:
Tim Allan, Portland 020 7404 5344
