ABSTRACT
This chapter offers guidance for tracing affect at film festivals. Building on the work of festival scholars who use Pierre Bourdieu to theorise festival capital, I argue that the most useful framework for understanding affect at film festivals is Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. Specifically, I focus on the circulation of “buzz” and theorize its operation in two case studies: an ethnographic analysis of the buzz surrounding Moonlight at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, and a textual analysis of an archive of queer film festival. By offering both ethnographic and archival case studies, my aim here is to demonstrate the flexibility affect theory can offer for various methodological approaches to studying film festivals.
