Film Festival Research Articles

Reshaping production practices: European film festivals, new Indonesian cinema, and the creative producer

ABSTRACT European film festivals pride themselves for their support of cinemas from developing countries by assisting under-resourced filmmakers, and by becoming co-producers through funds, pitching forums, and co-production arrangements. In engaging European film festivals, many filmmakers from ‘developing’ countries have gained exposure, experience, training, support, and critical capital that has helped their productions and careers. To date, festivals have facilitated the auteur model of the filmmaker, relying on the idea of the inspired authorial genius of the director to carry and realise a film project. With the changing operation and organization of festivals and their activities to a more results-oriented industry model underpinned by neoliberal social relations, new demands are placed on filmmakers who engage with festivals. This article argues that these new modes of engagement reveal the role of the creative producer in the film festival-filmmaker relationship, decentering attention from the director-as-auteur model that has shaped engagement and participation to date. Through a discussion of Indonesian film, and in particular, creative producer Meiske Taurisia (BabiButaFilm/Palari Films), this article shows how the producer provides the complementary skills and abilities to support a project and its director, enabling Indonesian films and their makers to participate in global film festivals.

An Uncertain Future: The 74th Berlin Film Festival

An Uncertain Future: The 74th Berlin Film Festival

Renegotiating Jia Zhangke’s Contestious Auteurism on Douban

Abstract This article focuses on sixth-generation mainland Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke and examines how his independent filmmaker’s profile is renegotiated and reevaluated on Douban, a China-based platform for cultural commentary. Whereas Douban allows viewers to rate a film, post a review of any length, and comment on other posts, it manifests a self-censoring tendency with sustained state control. Examining in Jia’s contentious auteurism through a “post-independent’ lens, this article recounts how Douban users approach and interpret Jia’s more recent titles such as Ash Is Purest White (2018) and Swimming Out till the Sea Turns Blue (2020) that pose a question of whether Jia’s auteurism is perpetuated. The account extends to the controversies surrounding Jia’s departure from and re-entry to the independently-run, government-supported Pingyao International Film Festival, which took place in 2020 and 2021 and have further perplexed his established brand. Contextualizing Jia’s Douban-represented authorial identity in China’s platform-based cultural production, this analysis unravels the intricate dynamics of market logic, state governance, and audience agency in the rise of the mass media-saturated intertextuality and crossover capitals.

Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women

Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, composers Renée C. Baker and Gonca Feride Varol, Indigenous film historian and booklet contributor Liza Black, and film scholar Kaveh Askari. The other included cocurator and film historian Maggie Hennefeld, silent film festival organizer Enrique Moreno Ceballos, film scholars and commentary contributors Yiman Wang, Aurore Spiers, and Kate Saccone, and film scholar Neta Alexander. Rachel Loewen transcribed the roundtables and Hennefeld and Horak condensed and cut together the conversations to highlight the key themes that emerged.

2024 Slamdance Film Festival Introduction

This is the introduction to our coverage of the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival.

Sundance Film Festival 2024 Introduction

This is the Introduction to our coverage of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

NEW INSIGHTS INTO COMMUNNICATIONS AND ARTS RESEARCH

 Are you a hater of Jews, an anti-Semite, once you call for a ceasefire in current Gaza war? New insights into media and communications as well as Arts and creativity research will debunk implications of this highly controversial query. Yet a valid and outrageous insinuation proposed by members of the political and cultural elite in Germany. Namely when dealing with the protest staged by a number of directors and actors who had particpated in the grand Finale of the famous film festival, Berlinale, in February of this year.   Said creators and participants in the movie industry had held up signs and placards, calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza war between the near-fascist Netanjahu regime and Hamas. 

Finally, beyond status quo? Analysis of steps taken to improve gender equality in the European audiovisual sector in light of the #MeToo movement

ABSTRACT This research examines the situation of women and the initiatives implemented to support women in the audiovisual sector in Europe in light of the #MeToo movement. Our study is grounded in critical feminist cultural theory. We engaged primarily in secondary data analysis of two study objects: (1) reports and studies that highlight the situation of women and (2) secondary data on initiatives and practices that aim to change the situation of women. We also conducted eight interviews. Although the representation of women in the audiovisual sector is still estimated to be 20–30%, there exist initiatives and actions aiming to support women by different means to reach equality in the labour market, tackle sexual harassment and gender stereotyping, and create visibility. These initiatives include networking opportunities, mentoring and training programmes, regulatory measures, psychological and legal support, and data gathering and provision. The success of the initiatives can depend on the organisational and funding structure/public support. Most initiatives involve NGOs, public service broadcasters (PSB), film festivals, public institutions, and film funding bodies. Finally, we recommend going beyond the notion of visibility while adopting an intersectional approach to action and data collection.

El world cinema en los festivales internacionales y las salas de cine en España (2016-2021)

In this study, we analyze the films in the world cinema category that have been screened at the two most important international film festivals in Spain: The San Sebastian International Film Festival, and the Valladolid International Film Week in the period of 2016-2021. It is also studied the output of these festivals in terms of screenings in the Spanish cinemas during the same period. The results show that nearly a third of the films at these two festivals belong to world cinema, and about a third of these films screened at the festivals have been shown in cinemas.

Quantifying the global film festival circuit: Networks, diversity, and public value creation.

Film festivals are a key component in the global film industry in terms of trendsetting, publicity, trade, and collaboration. We present an unprecedented analysis of the international film festival circuit, which has so far remained relatively understudied quantitatively, partly due to the limited availability of suitable data sets. We use large-scale data from the Cinando platform of the Cannes Film Market, widely used by industry professionals. We explicitly model festival events as a global network connected by shared films and quantify festivals as aggregates of the metadata of their showcased films. Importantly, we argue against using simple count distributions for discrete labels such as language or production country, as such categories are typically not equidistant. Rather, we propose embedding them in continuous latent vector spaces. We demonstrate how these "festival embeddings" provide insight into changes in programmed content over time, predict festival connections, and can be used to measure diversity in film festival programming across various cultural, social, and geographical variables-which all constitute an aspect of public value creation by film festivals. Our results provide a novel mapping of the film festival circuit between 2009-2021 (616 festivals, 31,989 unique films), highlighting festival types that occupy specific niches, diverse series, and those that evolve over time. We also discuss how these quantitative findings fit into media studies and research on public value creation by cultural industries. With festivals occupying a central position in the film industry, investigations into the data they generate hold opportunities for researchers to better understand industry dynamics and cultural impact, and for organizers, policymakers, and industry actors to make more informed, data-driven decisions. We hope our proposed methodological approach to festival data paves way for more comprehensive film festival studies and large-scale quantitative cultural event analytics in general.

Interview: A Childhood Story of Growth and Self‐Discovery: 20,000 Species of Bees

AbstractEstibaliz Urresola Solaguren, born on May 4, 1984, in Llodio, Álava, is a film director, screenwriter, and producer from the Basque Country, Spain. Her works include the documentary “Voces de papel” (2016) and the short film “Cuerdas” (2022). However, it is her first feature film, “20,000 species of bees” (2023), that earned widespread acclaim and won awards at various film festivals. This film delves into the challenges faced by a family with a transgender girl, drawing inspiration from the tragic story of Ekai Lersundi. Urresola's aspiration was to evoke empathy for the struggles of transgender individuals, fueled by the hope for societal change. The film's compelling narrative revolves around 8‐year‐old Cocó's journey of self‐discovery, challenging societal expectations and prompting his mother, Ane, to confront her own doubts and fears during a transformative summer spent with family.

“Documentary Filmmaking Is an Absolute Delight”

Vitaly Mansky is an internationally recognized documentary filmmaker whose writings, films, and programming practice have actively shaped the Russian documentary scene since the early 1990s. As a filmmaker, he has directed over thirty documentary productions that impress in their thematic scope and stylistic diversity. As the president of the ArtDocFest film festival, Mansky gave hundreds of independent filmmakers an opportunity to reach a broader audience. As a public figure, he has been vigorously promoting documentary cinema in his speeches and writing. In this interview with Film Quarterly, Mansky speaks about his path to documentary filmmaking, thoughts on documentary film form, the past and the future of Russian documentary cinema, his work as a curator and programmer, and his most recent documentary The Eastern Front (2023).

Interview

At the 2023 Telluride Film Festival, Film Quarterly editor-at-large B. Ruby Rich sat down with the noted philosopher Paul B. Preciado to discuss his path towards making his film debut with Orlando: My Political Biography (2023), a film that Rich considers the “first trans masterpiece.”

Modern practices of kunachestvo and good neighborliness in the South of Russia

Modern practices of establishing good neighborly relations between the people of the South of Russia, implemented through festival projects and various social and cultural events organized by leaders of public organizations and representatives of government structures, are revealed. It is shown how the festival "Peace to the Caucasus", which started in 1996, influenced the establishment of a peaceful dialogue between representatives of Ingushetia and Ossetia, between artists of professional groups from all over the South of Russia; psychologically set people up for general civil unity and a positive attitude towards each other. The expansion of the content of the Festival, the inclusion of exhibitions of arts and crafts and demonstrations "Podvoriy" also allowed to expand the composition of festival participants, to include amateur groups and soloists in its programs. The issues of choosing the locations of festivals, their financing, established traditions and the gradual expansion of the geography of participants are discussed. At the same time, the presence of certain problems associated with the lack of new "life-giving forces" aimed at achieving the general goal of establishing peace and harmony in the South of Russia is emphasized. Other practices of kunakry between creative teams and their leaders (Viktor Zakharchenko and Aslan Nekhay) are also shown, as well as examples of promoting initiatives aimed at highlighting the facts of good neighborliness and cooperation. These include the Kunaki documentary film festival and the Kunachestvo project, implemented by the Ministry for Cooperation with Civil Society Institutions and Ethnic Affairs of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic. The study used a content analysis of information from open sources and expert interviews on the spectrum of reflection and application in the modern culture of the North Caucasus and the South of Russia of the creative potential of the practices of kunakry and good neighborliness

The Busan International Film Festival

Jason Bechervaise examines the latest edition of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in the context of the external and internal problems that have plagued the festival over the past ten years, with a leadership crisis this spring once again putting the festival in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. This report explores BIFF’s curation of Korean cinema, with an emphasis on the festival’s importance as launch pad for young Korean filmmakers as well as how the festival’s programming, which now includes productions financed by streaming platforms, reflects the rapidly changing Korean film and media ecosystem.

2022~2023 러시아 영화 주요 경향 연구

This article is an attempt to examine Russian cinema as a whole in 2022-2023. Among the main trends in Russian cinema over the past two years, the first thing to be noted is its relationship to contemporary Russian society and history. Many of the Russian films that received high praise at home and abroad, were selected for prestigious international film festivals, including Cannes and Rotterdam, and were presented at major Russian film festivals or won prizes. In this article, we will focus on Kirill Serebrennikov's The Wife of Chaikovsky, which was selected in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, The Bullfinch(2023), directed by Boris Hlebnikov, one of the most important auteurs of contemporary Russian cinema, which was the opening film of the 2023 Moscow International Film Festival, Fairy Tail(2022), which had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, by Alexander Sokurov, who is considered a master not only of contemporary Russian cinema but also of world cinema, and finally, The Camel's Wayh, by Vitaly Suslin, who is one of the most Russian filmmakers of his generation and has built a unique body of work based on a very Russian setting. The second major trend in contemporary Russian cinema that I will discuss is the emergence of Russian regional cinema. I will analyze the film Pardon(2023), directed by Ainur Askarov from Bashkortostan, Plague(2023), directed by Yakutian director Dmitry Davydov, one of the most highly regarded films by international critics, and Aita (2023), directed by Yakutian director Stepan Burnashev. Contemporary Russian cinema is characterized by diversity, locality, and the presence of female directors. In other words, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian cinema has achieved unprecedented diversity, and not only central filmmakers centered in Moscow and Petersburg, but also local filmmakers including Yakutia are actively producing works.

국제영화제 이미지가 개최 도시 이미지와 관광객의 관광지 평가에 미치는 영향

This study aims to confirm through the case of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) how the image of the international film festival affects the image of the host city and the evaluation of tourist destinations through prior research. And the results of this study will give the necessary implications for improving the image of Busan. The results of this study are as follows. First, the image of the Busan International Film Festival had a significant impact on the image of the host region. Among the image factors of an international film festival, the event contents has a significant impact on the regional image. Second, the image of the Busan International Film Festival had a significant Among the factors of the international film festival image, event contents and event information have a significant impact on tourist destination evaluation. Third, regional image had a significant impact on tourists’ evaluation of touristdestinations. Regional image factors such as emotional image, cognitive image, and infrastructure all have a significant impact on tourist destination evaluation. As a tool to measure the experience of cultural tourists, the International Film Festival Image Scale has practical utility for successful festivals and stimulating the cultural desires of potential cultural tourists, and the influence relationship with regional image is significant as an attempt to understand the direction of regional economic revitalization through festivals.

A RYÛSUKE HAMAGUCHI MOVIE: ‘WALDEN'

<p>Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (1978) is one of the most important directors of contemporary cinema. He has won many awards with his films at the world's major film festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, and Venice and he received the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2022 with his movie <em>‘Drive My Car’</em>. Hamaguchi’s <em>‘Walden’</em> (2022) is one of Hamaguchi's recent movies. <em>‘Walden’</em> is a co-production of Austria, and Japan, premiered at The Festival Viennale (2022). Within Hamaguchi’s relatively mainstream cinema poetics, the movie <em>‘Walden’</em> is an experimental work that invites the spectator to a deep contemplation. The film is a 2-minute, almost monochrome record of a water surface with reflections of trees, raindrops, vibration waves, water rings, bird songs, swarming insects, several sounds of nature, a floating leaf, etc. In addition to the sounds of nature, the film includes a female voice excerpt with music from Douglas Sirk's <em>‘All That Heaven Allows’</em> (1955). Jean Wyman who is the protagonist “Cary Scott” of <em>‘All That Heaven Allows’</em>, reads some lines from Henry David Thoreau's book Walden (1854). This movie at the same time is a documentary record of a water surface; a free cinematographic adaptation of Henri David Thoreau's autobiographical book <em>‘Walden’</em>, a deep romantic landscape through continuous and random visual variations occurring on the surface and a crystallization of Hamaguchi’s style. Hamaguchi’s <em>‘Walden’</em> surface also becomes an interface where Hamaguchi the artist, and the spectator meet temporally to explore the noema of existence, nature, and cinema within a Heideggerian-verse. Besides the 2- minute durée of the film and its surface subject indicates a continuous oscillation between Kronos and Aion in the Deleuzian sense.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0758/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Analysis of Kinesic and Proxemic Signs Structure in the Animated Music Video "Sabda Alam"

Media campaigns are designed to attract the attention of their audience, including through animated music video media. In an animated music video, the delivery of messages is combined through narration, characters and music. This research discusses "Sabda Alam", an animated music video about protection for endemic Indonesian birds. This animated music video is the final work of the students of SMK Raden Umar Said (RUS) Kudus which received appreciation at the Balinale International Film Festival 2021. The visualization of endemic bird life presented in "Sabda Alam" is an illustration of the existence of wild animals in relation to nature and humans as an effort to survive in their habitat. The visualization of these endemic birds is interesting to study as messages packaged through visualization structured nonverbal. The analysis in this study uses qualitative methods with a nonverbal communication theory approach, namely kinesic studies related to visualization as a language of movement, and proxemic studies as visualization of space which becomes the setting of the narrative. The results of the study explain that there is an arrangement of facial and postural signs in the sign structure kinesic, in the form of character expression and bird appearance. Meanwhile, in the proxemic sign structure, signs are presented through the relationship between the character of the bird and the time and space of events. The relationship between kinesic and proxemic signs structure is proven to represent messages about the importance of protecting endangered wild animals. This research can be an academic reference in the field of visual communication design, especially the sensitivity to read visual signs as messages.

On the Independent Spirit of the FIRST International Film Festival and the Thematic Trends of Its Works

On the Independent Spirit of the FIRST International Film Festival and the Thematic Trends of Its Works