film festivals as distribution platforms
Delivering local films to local audiences
this article demonstrates how film festivals have become crucial to both the Australian film industry and the cinema industry at large over the last 10 years to the point that they have almost replaced the art-house circuit and come to provide a highly specialised distribution channel for small to medium budget films.
Film festivals have been abundantly theorised
providing audiences with opportunities to enjoy commercially unviable films projected in a communal spaceĀ
In this concept of festivals, two drivers converge, one economic and one cultural.
cinephilicĀ is the term used to refer to a passionate interest in films, film theory, and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love.
as the distribution of independent films has waned through standard cinemas, it has partly diverted to film festivals.Ā
The increase in popularity of film festivals is not only related to the expansion and mainstreaming of diasporic communities (Dolgopolov 2014), but also the increasing specialisation of distribution and in response to the continued monopolisation of the formal art-house multiplex system.
there are very few further promotional, exhibition or distribution opportunities for films included in their program
Festivals are not marketing tools, but the crucial distribution and commodification mechanism.
It first and foremost sets the terms for distribution, marketing and exhibition, yet to an increasing extent it regulates production as well,
festivals are the most reliable distribution outlet for independent films, and that festivals now form a parallel and non-competing system of production and distribution to the rest of the cinema industry.
The immersive environments that festivals offer place an emphasis on a film-going experience that cannot be replicated elsewhere and change the experience of and a spectatorās terms of engagement with the film itself.Ā
film festivals as distributors are playing an increasingly and disproportionately active role in shaping, funding and disseminating both independent cinema and local film today.
Normal programming was often polite, boring and safe, and they loved independent, art-house, experimental, cult and general marginal weirdo cinema.
They feverous abhorrence for funding procedures, bureaucracies, and language. Generating revenue from ticket sales became our main financial strategy.
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