What happens when film festivals can't happen

Abstract

Covid-19 marked a historic moment in the film festival world. The pandemic outbreak fundamentally impacted the geographic organization and calendar of the film industry with strings of film festivals unable to take place in their regular live-event form. This book aims to document and think through an ongoing crisis: looking at a wide variety of international festivals, the contributors use adaptive approaches that both connect to earlier models and methods and search for new frames and tools to understand what happens when festivals can’t happen. Co-editors Antoine Damiens and Marijke de Valck underscore how contributors have worked from a set of shared conceptual entry points, acknowledging the global nature of the festival phenomenon as well as seeing different local responses and effects and pushing against linear understandings of crisis management by connecting the various “make do” and innovative solutions to earlier experiments and practices.