NEW YORK, Feb. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International announced today a partnership which will bring the Academy Award(R) nominated live action and animated short films to select U.S. theatres before the award ceremony is held on March 5th. The films will later be available through HDNet and Magnolia's new Home Entertainment division. The series will also be available across other platforms that include ShortsTV on mobile phones.

"Up until now, people had very little access to see Academy short nominations before the Academy ceremony. We're excited to have the opportunity to showcase these fantastic films while they're still in contention for the big prize," said Magnolia President Eamonn Bowles.

CEO of Shorts International Carter Pilcher added, "This year's Oscar nominated shorts are the year's best films. In the past, only insiders and Academy voters got to see this powerful, short form cinema. Now, for the first time, they're available to theatre-goers and will reach the audience they deserve."

The series will run starting February 24th at the Cinema Village in New York and Laemmle Fairfax in Los Angeles as well as weeklong runs with Landmark Theatres in San Francisco, Detroit, Berkeley, Atlanta, Seattle, and Denver. Regal Cinemas will show the program in Austin and Portland on February 26th and 27th and The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago will run the series March 3rd through 9th. More markets will be added in the coming weeks. More markets will be added in the coming weeks.

The deal was negotiated by Magnolia's Head of Acquisitions Tom Quinn, Head of Business Affairs Jason Janego and Eamonn Bowles with Carter Pilcher, Susan Petersen, Simon Young, and Linda Olszewski representing Shorts International.

Shorts International, a division of Britshorts Limited, is the world's leading short film company with the largest and most diverse film catalogue devoted to short films, that includes titles from the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute and the former Hypnotic catalogue. Shorts International has also recently launched ShortsTV(TM) and ShortsTV Corto(TM) (Spanish language version), a short film channel created for distribution to mobile television and cable television networks.

Magnolia Pictures, an independent distributor, recently released Roger Donaldson's The World's Fastest Indian with Anthony Hopkins, Alex Gibney's Academy Award-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and also mounted the successful multi-platform release of Steven Soderbergh's Bubble. Magnolia Pictures is part of a vertically-integrated group of media properties co-owned by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban that also includes the Landmark Theatres chain, production companies HDNet Films and 2929 Productions, high-definition cable networks HDNet and HDNet Movies, and film and television library Rysher Entertainment. For more information: www.magpictures.com.

Source: Magnolia Pictures

Web site: http://www.magpictures.com/