Abstract
For the past four years, Screen has contributed to a new and vibrant debate about the definitions, workings and meanings of film festivals within screen studies. This contribution has included reports on symposia, book reviews, a dossier on film festivals and reports on specific film festivals. Early in this discussion, Dorota Ostrowska noted ‘the absence of history as one of the disciplines which could help shed some light on the phenomenon of film festivals’, and warned that ‘If film festival studies are going to take off, this cannot happen without history having some place in it’.1 She also cited the discipline of anthropology as one of the initial proposed inspirations for the shaping of film festival studies.2 And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly given the difficulty of analyzing events as short-lived yet multidimensional as film festivals, little scholarship exists that draws together the methodologies of history and anthropology to offer a diachronic study of a particular festival. The advantages of this combined methodology are clearly evident in, for example, Marijke De Valck's profound understanding of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, Cindy Wong's insider analysis of the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and Nikki Lee and Julian Stringer's careful study of the ‘counter-programming’ of the Udine Far East Film Festival.3
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