Shaping Film Festivals in a Changing World: Practice and Methods

Abstract

Film festival studies is a sub-discipline that has gained momentum in cinema scholarship in recent years. The book Shaping Film Festivals in a Changing World: Practice and Methods, edited by Dorota Ostrowska and Tamara L. Falicov in 2025, contributes to this field by bringing into question on methodological approaches and applications in film festivals. The volume originates from the conference Contours of Film Festivals Research and Methodologies, which was initially planned as an in-person event in London in March 2020 but was held online in September of the same year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The online conferance enabled the participation of researchers from around the world, as well as “voices from the field” such as festival managers, curators, and programmers to bring together both practice-led and practice-based research. The book seeks to go beyond methodological boundaries in investigations of film festival culture and to introduce new approaches to the field (Ostrowska & Falicov, 2025, p. 12). This book review focuses on three studies from this open-access volume addressing the archive, the methodology and the limitations and possibilities of festivals in the context of film festivals: “Film Preservation, Archives, and Film Festivals in Latin America” (Suárez), “Positionality, Immersive Methodology, and Collaboration in Film Festival Research” (Sendra) and “Tell Me Why You Care? Film Festival Cultures, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Care” (Ostrowska).