Abstract
Film festivals are venues with public screenings that hold a great potential for meetings, tourism, and economy. This chapter analyzes the alternatives found by some international and Brazilian film festivals in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic for the future horizon of festivals and the possible impacts of this new scenario on the audiovisual system. The chapter also presents the formats chosen by several festivals around the world, organizing their strategies into five correlated models: traditionalist, hybrid, mimetic, online, and nostalgic strategies. Such organization also originates from the research on technological forms found to soften, replace, or even expand the audience of the festivals (i.e., the development of their own streaming platforms, employment of existing platforms, and development of additional tools) to the streaming services. In the face of a digital panorama, with streaming platforms screening and distributing films, questions on the new relations between film festivals and digital platforms and their prospects arise.
TopIntroduction
Film festivals represent a sector of great circulation of people and ideas, with a direct positive impact on the economy, culture, and tourism of any country. With a market difficult to be evaluated due to the fact that it includes not only the event itself – but a large and complex circuit of exchanges encompassing publications, schools and universities, hotels, and transportation networks –, film festivals have been hit by the Covid-19 pandemic in a very direct and particular way.
The closing of movie theaters almost all over the world suggested that the festivals were destined to fail or to postpone their editions. But that was not exactly what happened. Due to the ease provided by streaming and online resources, some festivals quickly retraced strategies and faced the challenge posed by the pandemic offering online versions still in 2020, as in Europe with the Oberhausen German festival (https://www.locarnofestival.ch/LFF/home), in Switzerland. The platform houses so-called “independent” festivals and even allows a community to create their own online film festival.
The aim of this chapter is to create an inventory of case studies regarding film festivals at the age of the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, the film festivals’ organizational and structural response to Covid-19 will be scrutinized in order to gauge the impact of their respective changes. Some festival curators and organizers were specially interviewed for this chapter, to provide us with more detailed information on the most successful strategies adopted, what has been changed temporarily, and what changes have come to stay. In addition, the impact of those changes on the broader scope of the cities’ tourism and local economies will be considered as much as possible. As mentioned above, film festivals trigger a chain reaction that affects a complex circuit in terms of the cities’ economy and infrastructure. Let us take an example from Brazil: a loss of about R$ 1.5 million in a period equivalent to one month. This is the reality of Tiradentes, a historic city in the state of Minas Gerais that is more than 300 years old and has 99% of its economy focused on tourism and culture. This loss is estimated by Henrique Rohrmann, Tiradentes’s Secretary of Tourism, Culture, Sport and Leisure, and Rodrigo Mendonça, the city’s Finance Secretary (Prata, 2021).
There will be no space to look further into the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the cities’ tourism revolving around film festivals, but this is an issue to be developed in future works. However, the present chapter will provide an inventory of the film festivals’ renewed strategies in response to the pandemic. This inventory of case studies may offer an introduction to further developments in terms of the future of film curation, film festivals’ organization and arthouse film fruition. It can be added to similar research efforts, as in the methodology developed by Salti (2020), and Hanzlík and Mazierska (2021). Based on a bibliography on the subject, special interviews with curators and organizers, and
Key Terms in this Chapter
On-Line Film Festivals: Film festivals around the globe that adopted the online participation of viewers by using the streaming computational methodology. In some cases, the festivals adopted the traditional audience participation, i.e., online tickets to enter a digital room to watch a film première or a feature film in a specific time and date. Some festivals adopted the model of an open streaming of their films schedule during the time of the venue and in other cases film festivals decided to publish their selection open to the public.
Film Festivals Analytics: A model of cultural and data algorithmic analysis of viewers participation in film festivals based on attendance, geolocalization, online digital presence in order to grant film festivals organizers the analysis of the festival's impact on the local economy, measuring concepts as soft power of the city, touristic impact of the digital presence of the festival and the creation of an online digital presence of the Festival in social media and alike.
Digital Festivals Platforms: Computational systems specifically developed for film festivals, granting access to specific festival models’ attendance as rooms to watch film premières, data analytics of film attendance, rooms with ticket sales for streaming of films during a certain period of time reproducing the traditional film festival environment.
Streaming: A form of online film distribution based on a global computational distributed grid media environment to be viewed on any digital gadget with screen such as cell phones, tablets, or computers. A streaming film can be also projected on theaters in real-time.