Nov 11, 2022

After a decade of delivery hell, the Spanish stop-motion feature "O Apóstolo" can be streamed online for free.

Fernando Cortizo's stop-motion feature O Apóstolo (Apostle) is a powerful festival run where the film won several major awards, including the Annecy Audience Award in 2013.

In a description of the film on Youtube, Cortizo explains why he made O Apóstolo available to watch for free, and explains why the original distribution was so popular. You are calling the viewer.

If you watch for free on this channel and like movies, you may make a donation here to pay the debt of the production costs because you did not recover the production costs because of the distributor's fraud.

In 2016, Cortizo and producer Isabel Ray publicly accused the film's distributors, saying, "The situation is very different between the Spanish distributor Aquelarre, who did not pay a guaranteed minimum and kept all proceeds from the cinema, and the Latin American distributor Aquelarre, who continued to publish the film on its website and did not pay anything." "This is due to multiple scams by the co・producer and distributor Tayrona Entertainment," he explained.

Cortizo and Ray say the film was played on television in Latin American and Russian theaters, But that Aquelarre denies much and has never paid the producers of the film anything for sale in those areas. In Spain, Cortizo and Rey were promised commercial screenings in 80 cinemas, but in the end O Apóstolo was only played in 13 places.

Thinking about running the film festival and its eventual distribution, Ray told Cartoon Brew, "We were newbies and didn't know how that market worked. In the end, they played a movie every week during the matinee or only one morning."

In a decade, the cost of production has not yet fully recovered, because the film had a disastrous theatrical run. According to Ray, the owner of Aquelarre liquidated that company and established another company without facing the impact on the loss of O Apóstolo.

It is the right to distribute the film that Cortizo and Ray have recovered. Now that the future of O Apóstolo is back in their own hands, Cortizo and Rey want to finally discover a bit of catharsis and let the world finally have honest access to the film

"We really want to turn the page," Ray explained. "The distribution of the film is doing very well on the new website. The idea is to make everything available there.

"We had a few bad years in this film, both psychologically and economically," Cortizo added. "But our attitude right now is that the people who watch the movie are the kind of people who really want to see it, and they value the work we've done. We are asking for donations to cover the lost costs, but in most cases the fees we did not get when the film was distributed so poorly."

Sadly, the shared experience of Cortizo and Rey with o Apóstolo hurt the duo in their independent productions, and in the future the original indie film will be released. There are no plans to make a disney movie. But both continue to work in the industry, and many irons have emerged, including Shkid, an ambitious 2d hand-drawn feature-length project being co-produced in Spain, Mexico and the Czech Republic.