Welcome to The Kinopanorama Experience!

KINOPANORAMA is the only three-strip widescreen panoramic cinema format to go the distance, some five decades since the first Soviet production, ‘Vast is my Native Land’ (aka ‘Great is my Country’) was premiered on 28 February 1958 at the Mir Kino Theatre.

John Steven Lasher, a 30-year veteran in the music industry, is responsible for the re-launch of KINOPANORAMA as a commercial film format in 1993. The fact that the penultimate Soviet production in three-strip, ‘Winter Etudes’, had been released three-decades earlier did not deter Fifth Continent Australia Pty Ltd., Mr Lasher’s company, from locating an extant PSO-1960 cine-camera in Russia and commissioning its restoration to working order.

Fifth Continent Australia Pty Ltd has allocated AUD 75,000.00 to date, upgrading the KINOPANORAMA cine-camera / equipment and the custom-built Rotovision 7-channel 35mm magnetic sound recorder / playback unit, the latter of which is only one of two such in working order (the other is located at Chase Audio in Burbank, California), to meet contemporary filming and post-production standards. 

In the past 15-years, thanks to corporate sponsorship from Fujifilm Australia and Digital Films [Melbourne], Mr Lasher has realised his various projects. He has produced two short-subject KINOPANORAMA films (‘Bounty’ and ‘Chastity Truth and Kinopanorama’) in Australia, funded in partnership with Vision 146 SARL [France] the restoration of 2-reels of ‘Naughty Curves’ [‘Opasniye Povoroty’], and in June 2010 completed post-production on ‘Autumn in the Dandenongs’ at Digital Pictures in Melbourne.

Mr Lasher has also been instrumental in the formation of The Kinopanorama Widescreen Preservation Association, Incorporated, as a not-for-profit entity. The business plan includes various fund-raising activities scheduled to commence in mid-2012, so that a volunteer-operated special-venue cinema in New South Wales may be realised within the next two years.

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Website (c) copyright 2012 Fifth Continent Australia Pty Ltd. P O Box 246. Menindee NSW 2879.

Contact us at fifconaus@gmail.com for additional information.