ABSTRACT
Film festivals are constituted by borders: the flow of films and resources permitted by globalised “free” trade, and the circulation of narratives that represent borders and their transgression. This chapter asks how approaches to studying film festivals change when we allow them to be led by notions of migration. It advocates for the treatment of such notions as fluid rather than fixed, creating a “borderland” of meaning and, ultimately, research that remains open to transience, contradiction and ambivalence (Anzaldúa, 1987). I explore data-driven and case study-based methodologies, discuss the understandings of migration and the film festival network produced by each, and consider how we might bring both together in an iterative “pluriverse” of film festival studies (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).
