Vulnerabilities and Resiliency in the Festival Ecosystem: Notes on Approaching Film Festivals in Pandemic Times

Abstract

Film festivals are hit particularly hard in pandemic times. Safety regulations restrict festivals in core activities and organizations suffer from the ensuing economic shock. The global health crisis interferes in the logics of the global art film economy, which is paced by an annual festival and award season rhythm. The impact of COVID-19 on film festivals, however, cannot be generalized. These notes distinguish film festivals on a continuum between film-driven and festival-driven events, remind scholars to consider the diverging vulnerabilities in the film festival ecosystem, and end with a call to combine a tradition in case-study-based scholarship with large-scale data projects to face the challenge of theorizing transitions in the film festival ecosystem.