CresCine in PLOS ONE: Quantifying the global film festival circuit: Networks, diversity, and public value creation

CresCine researchers Vejune Zemaityte, Ulrike Rohn and Indrek Ibrus, together with Cultural Analytics Scholar Andres Karjus and Professor for Cultural Data Analytics Maximilian Schich performed a large-scale analysis of over 600 film festivals worldwide, spanning 13 years, to reveal insights into diversity and public value creation in the film industry now published in PLOS One.

Here is what Vejune says about the work:

🕸 We model festivals as a global network connected by shared films to learn about their structure and dynamics. Results show that the festival network is highly interconnected and operates on a clear temporal rhythm where programming overlaps primarily between festivals 1-2 years apart.

🎞 We quantify festivals as aggregates of their films’ metadata (genre, origin country, language), placing events across continuous latent spaces for each characteristic. Such mapping allows us to identify 5 thematic/genre festival clusters, including general (drama), documentary, genre (horror, sci-fi, etc), queer, and children’s festivals, highlighting the diverse range of programming specialisation within the circuit.

🌎 We also identify 4 broad geographic festival sub-circuits focused on content from Europe, North America, Asia, and Latin America, and 5 linguistic festival groups featuring content in English, Spanish, French, a mix of European languages, and a mix of Asian languages. The festival circuit's high geographic and linguistic content diversity separates it from other forms of film distribution, such as theatrical or VOD, that are dominated by English-language content from the US.

📚 The latent space embedding approach also enables us to quantify diversity in festival programming. We measure the internal, external, and contributing diversities of A-list festivals accredited by FIAPF and B-list events (others). Festivals (especially the B-list) became more thematically diverse between 2012-21. Yet, the circuit’s geographic diversity based on film origin decreased starkly during COVID-19 (in both A- and B-list).

🚺 We also examine gender diversity in film festivals based on directors and producers of programmed films. Most festivals are gender-imbalanced (but B-list events are slightly more diverse). Yet, we see progress towards gender inclusion as the share of women creatives in programming increases between 2012-21.

🎓 We hope the methodologies showcased in this paper will be valuable for not only researchers but also industry professionals and policymakers: i.e., to track diversity across various dimensions, identify areas for improvement in programming practices, or inform funding decisions aimed at promoting cultural diversity in the film industry.

Read the full paper here.