Diana Mantese
This list was born out of the discussions that took place throughout the duration of the module Film Festivals at Birkbeck, University of London in the first half of 2025. The class aimed to explore, through a variety of perspectives, the role of festivals in relation to contemporary film culture, and why they have mattered historically. Inspired by the different questions in Film Festival Studies to which we’ve been acquainted through this module, I have compiled this playlist with the hope that it will illustrate the sheer variety of ways film festivals have seeped into mainstream culture, how they’ve been represented in different medias, and the ways new affordances and channels can help film festivals evolve and adapt to an ever-changing media landscape.
Thank you to my classmates and to our lecturer, Dr. Finn Daniels-Yeomans, for making the module so enriching and inspiring.
A Playlist within the Playlist: Festival Feeling
The first few entries are from a non-exhaustive list of films about film festivals in any capacity that I have compiled on Letterboxd, some of which have had very limited distribution and are not readily available. The first is the collective movie To Each his Own Cinema (Various Directors, France, 2007), a project commissioned by Gilles Jacob for the 60th anniversary of Cannes Film Festival. The film is comprised of thirty-four three-minutes-long films by various directors worldwide (of which Jane Campion is the only woman, making the masculine possessive pronoun glaringly evident in the title), inspired by their feelings about movie theatres. It is a manifesto for the love of film and can help us think about the ways festivals are often described as the quintessential sites of cinephilia.
As part of the course material for the Film Festivals module we had two set screenings, the next two titles on the list: Katjavivi and Mcata’s 2019 Film Festival Film (Perivi Katjavivi and Mpumelelo Mcata, South Africa, 2019) and Toback’s 2013 Seduced and Abandoned (James Toback, USA, 2013). Both follow directors pitching their films to various people and use documentary aesthetics to explore the weird world of film festivals; however, if the first raises questions of expectations, belonging and the necessity of film festivals to reckon with the way they reproduce colonial narratives, the latter is a cringeworthy portrait of Cannes and its relationship with Hollywood where the most sexist and power-hungry streaks of the movie industry come to the fore, the director “woe-is-me-ing” his way through a cast of interviewees of which more than half now have a substantial “sexual misconduct” section in their Wikipedia pages. Similar titles to the latter are Overnight (Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith, USA, 2003) and Cannes Man (Richard Martini and Susan Hillary Shapiro, USA/France, 1996), which also tread the line between fiction and documentary and which reiterate the image of film festivals (and specifically Cannes) as a space of masculine transactions, as they offer scenes after scenes of sycophantic men trying to get in each other’s graces to put some money towards their projects while invariably also including countless sexist “jokes” for no particular reason. The last title in this microgenre seems to be Official Rejection (Paul Osborne, USA, 2009), also a comical documentary which follows the struggle of indie filmmakers as they bring their small movie around the festival circuit.
You can stream Film Festival Film at Highball TV.
In fiction, the most recent example of this comes from Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (Richard Linklater, France/USA, 2025), a film following the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1960). In the first act of the movie, a sequence is set at the 1959’s Cannes Film Festival where François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows/Les Quatre Cents Coups (François Truffaut, France, 1959) is opening the festival, and the scene after it shows Godard pitching his idea for a movie to producer Georges de Beauregard in an empty street in Cannes. Cannes Film Festival and the Nouvelle Vague have a deeply interrelated history, and this movie depicts the beginning of that while also highlighting how encounters at festivals can set film history in motion (where would cinema be without Breathless?).
Another representation of festivals in film comes from a darling of Cannes, Wes Anderson, and 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. The film is bookended by the fictional “Loquasto International Film Festival”, a pastiche of the world’s three oldest festivals (Venice, Cannes and Locarno). Rewatching with a film festival frame in mind reveals just how much this film is actually about filmmaking, the collective joy and struggle of it, as Zissou bickers and fights with his producer, journalists, rival directors and fans attending the festival. The film closes with Zissou winning the Golden Sardine statuette, first prize at Loquasto.
A further type of films about festivals are those documentaries which tend towards reportage and try and trace the history of festivals themselves. Of these, I found a handful of titles, including Johan Van Der Keuken’s Sarajevo Film Festival Film (Netherlands, 1993), a postcard from the first edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival organised in the midst of the city’s almost 4-year-long siege. There is something to say about reportage-inspired films about festivals, as the lines blur with audiovisual material festivals themselves can produced as festival ephemera – and which put forward the question of accessibility of these materials and how can they be properly archived.
Sarajevo Film Festival Film is available on youtube.
Ways to access the films (if possible) are listed on Letterboxd on the page of each entry at the following link: https://letterboxd.com/dia_mante/list/festival-feeling/
Miami Gay and lesbian Film Festival Trailer (Onix M. Padrón, USA, 2007).
The 2007 trailer for this festival stands out in the pool of film festival trailers. Created by Onix M. Padrón, this ‘docu-trailer’ – as coined by Padrón herself – explores the complicated history of the gay rights movement in Florida and highlights the figurehead that made the fight particularly difficult, pop singer turned anti gay rights crusader, Anita Bryant. The docu-trailer both educates and empowers the viewer, whilst revealing little of the festival itself except for positioning it as a place to celebrate individuality and continue fighting for equality.
Watch the trailor on vimeo.
Added by Chay Giles: An actor and Film MA student based in London, England. Chay became enamoured by this trailer when studying Film Festivals at Birkbeck University and has since written an essay on it, drawing on Ger Zielinski‘s studies of festival ephemera.
Film Festivals on TV
Catch as Catch Cannes – The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries S02E2A (Al Zegler, USA, 1996).
As film festivals have cemented themselves as yearly rituals of the entertainment industry their fame and status have also broken the confinement of the film world and entered mainstream spaces. Nothing exemplifies this better than the representations in these two cartoons.I stumbled upon this cartoon while searching for an article on Cannes written by Andrew Sarris titled “Catch As Catch Cannes: The Moles and The Moths”. While the article, reporting from the 1978 edition of the festival, was an interesting read, this representation of the iconic film festival, almost satirical even if aimed at children, really caught my attention. In this episode of the ‘90s Looney Tunes TV series The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries, the reels of film and prize of the “James Caan Film Festival” (held in fictional Cannes Knot, next to Cannes, France) are stolen by an aspiring cineaste who wants to organise the world’s first floating film festival on his yacht. Cheesy puns galore aside, the short episode highlights the glitz and glam around the film festival events and its spatial and temporal contingencies, as characters encounter or impersonate famous producers to get to their aims.
Watch Catch as Catch Cannes at Daily Motion.
A star is Burns – The Simpsons S06E18 (Susie Dietter, USA 1995).
In this episode of The Simpsons, Springfield decides to host a film festival to boost tourism after the city is ranked the most unpopular place in the US. This premise underlines the deep historical connection between film festivals and the tourism industry, which was the original engine that put in motion the film festival circuit in European resort towns in the first half of the century. The episode is rife with film and TV meta-references, and it’s a crossover with the animated sitcom “The Critic”, a series about the life of a 30-something film critic in New York. The episode overall wasn’t well-received, as this crossover element wasn’t felt to be successful; however, the short films submitted to the festival by the Springfield inhabitants remain well-loved gags. The breakout star (and winner of the festival) is Barney’s entry “Pukahontas”, an experimental and poetic reflection on his alcoholism. Barney’s unexpected film and win poke fun at the preconceptions we hold as to what a film should be about and look like to be successful at a festival – and that’s usually “experimental”, “cerebral” or “arthouse”. The episode also shows the crowd reacting to each movie, and how these reactions such as “booing” are not only discordant to what would be accepted at a normal cinema screening but also reference how standing ovations and “booings” have become a tradition in the relationship between audiences and cineastes in the context of film festivals.
Watch the sequence on YouTube.
Mubi collection: “Le Booing”
So much has “booing” become a tradition in the context of festivals that the most prestigious (and ruthless) one, Cannes Film Festival, has been the object of a curated selection (on arthouse streaming platform Mubi) of movies the crowd has immediately rejected, but have since been reevaluated buy the public (and critics). If it’s true that festival reactions can make or break films, this goes to show how the crowd isn’t always right – and how specific crowds also have specific tastes.
The collection (now only partially available) is on Mubi.
New Online Spaces for Festivals
With the proliferation of the film festival network and with global cinephilia on the rise, new online spaces besides mainstream social media and streaming services have carved a place reserved specifically for film festivals. FilmFreeway is a website specifically aimed at streamlining the process of film submission, helping filmmakers and festival connect across the globe. Streaming platform Mubi, boasting their cinephile street cred since its early days, has lately begun hosting its own itinerant Festival (Mubi Fest) and is partnering with established festivals (such as Locarno) not only as a distributer but as a main sponsor for different initiatives (such as minor prizes or masterclasses etc.). On the platform itself, the main way festivals are showcased are seasonally, with special collections (as my previous example), but one also has the possibility of browsing for movies through a Film Festival filter. Social Media film discovery platform Letterboxd has also been slowly creeping into the routine of the film festival network, with its editors on their social media team slowly becoming regulars behind the microphone on red carpets and press junkets worldwide. Furthermore, on the platform festivals themselves are able to sign up as “HQ” accounts, enjoying the possibility of logging and rating films, creating lists and articles and interacting with the community at large.
@shortmemecorner
With a username spoofing Cannes’ Short Film Corner, this (now dead?) Instagram account produced memes about short film festivals from an insider point of view. The ironic and satirical vein of the posts poked fun at the idiosyncrasies of people working for festivals as well as wider industry issues, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but its levity and relatability made it a cult account for people in the know, often with official festival accounts and insiders actively commenting and sharing the posts.
Available on Instagram.
Diana Mantese is an aspiring film maker, curator and writer. They are currently enrolled in the IMACS programme from the University of Udine in North-East Italy. Some of their research interests are TV Series, Queer Media, Movie Theatres and the Exhibition sector, and the ways audiovisual media become part of people’s everyday lives. Here is their portfolio: https://sites.google.com/view/dianamantese/home?authuser=1.