ABSTRACT

This chapter offers up strategies for students and researchers new to the topic to write about film festivals as events. It highlights the challenges that the temporary, experiential and multifaceted nature of festival events pose for approaches to research and writing. Film festivals are, in many ways, about screen media. Through their programs they are showcases of films, as well as increasingly other forms of screen media, such as television, web film, and virtual reality. Writing about festivals becomes akin to detective work, then, with researchers needing to reconstruct the record and search through ephemera to write about events. Media anthropologist Daniel Dayan, writing of the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, notes that alongside the audio-visual event there exists another “written festival”. This meta-festival of printed words – including film reviews, program notes, posters, and press releases – works to caption and transcribe a version of the festival, shaping not only the experience of navigating the event, but producing its record.