Sydney Levine(I)

Sydney Levine has 40+ years experience in the entertainment industry. Before inventing FilmFinders in 1988, the film industry's first database, she served as Vice President of Acquisitions for Republic Pictures and previously spent three years of acquiring feature films for Lorimar. Levine's international contacts have resulted in acquisitions ranging from specialized foreign features, such as "My Beautiful Laundrette", "Tampopo" and "Letter to Brezhnev" as well as a wide variety of artistic and commercial genres. She has also worked in international distribution for Twentieth Century Fox in Amsterdam where she was the first woman ever hired in international distribution, and in marketing for ABC Video Enterprises. In 1988 she founded FilmFinders with her partner Peter Belsito to act as a back office for acquisitions executives in both distribution and sales as well as festival programmers needing to track new films worldwide for acquisition and to consult with producers needing to plan festival and sales and financing strategies.

In 2006 she merged FilmFinders with Withoutabox and together they were acquired by IMDb in 2008 where she integrated FilmFinders into IMDbPro and exited in 2009.

She has also taught at Chapman, UCLA Extension Film and Business Schools, at The New School of Social Research as well as at Deutsche Welle Akademie, MAIA, The Binger Institut, Cannes Market Producers Workshop, Berlinale Talent Campus, is a frequent moderator on panels and at seminars and serves on festival juries.

She is has written Iberoamerican Film: The Business and Funding by Country, published in Spanish by the University of Guadalajara in 2016.

Levine's educational background includes a Master's Degree from the University of Southern California, a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of California and a License from the Sorbonne University of Paris. She is fluent in several languages and travels extensively on the international film market circuit.