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Arts festivals use projects to showcase creative works, configuring a creative field, whether locally, regionally or internationally, by whom engages and attends to the arts festival: artists, funders, media and audiences. This study compares the Edinburgh and Berlin arts festivals founded after World War II. Each city began with a founding festival. Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama sought to reconcile and heal international relations whereas the Berlin International Film Festival sought to showcase free expression and democracy. Both founding festivals were internationally oriented, as seen in their names. Each city added festivals over time and engaged in distinct temporal strategies and configured different creative fields. Edinburgh’s additional festivals entrained to its founding festival, synchronizing in time and place five festivals which led to greater duration and intensity of the experience and configured an international creative field: artists, media, and audiences who attended and engaged with the city festivals. In contrast, Berlin’s founding Film festival, which was internationally oriented, was followed by festivals that were treated as distinct, scheduling each festival sequentially across a yearly calendar and configuring a creative field regionally oriented around Germanic language and culture. Thus, a city’s temporal strategies for arts festivals may configure international, regional and local creative fields, changing who comprises the field to interact.

In-person film festival experiences have faced uncertain futures since the spread of COVID-19. Snap-lockdowns, unclear and rapidly changing rules to public density allowances in theatres, distribution and challenges of “working-from-home” have become prominent issues to creative and cultural workers employed within the film festival ecosystem. The purpose of this paper, drawing from a series of interviews with film festival directors, organisers and workers within Australia, offers insight into the working lives of those employed within the film festival sector during 2020.

Using the research team's existing professional networks and a targeted approach of participant recruitment, this paper draws upon interview data from 5 semi-structured interviews with participants located in various Australian capital cities, who were working in the film festival sector during 2020. Participants were all mid-career, having at least 5 years of employment experience within the film festival ecosystem (directors, programmers and content creators) as well as having experience in other adjacent cultural and creative work.

The results in this study highlight common concerns of the legacy precarity has on professional and creative practice for those engaged in creative and cultural work, but also of unusual and unexpected opportunities for creativity and new film festival delivery beyond the dominant mode of in-theatre only experience pre-COVID-19.

The originality of this study lies in its qualitative exploration of the various employment experiences of Australian film festival workers during COVID-19.

This article explores how the commentary of intermediaries – third-party entities that do not have direct economic stakes in the sales of goods – can contribute to the creation of new market categories comprising preexisting but neglected and undervalued goods. Specifically, I study how the Sundance Institute facilitated the creation of a market for independent cinema in the United States, suggesting that intermediaries create market categories by defining boundaries, generating criteria of evaluation, and setting standards for measuring and establishing hierarchies of quality, which help audiences understand and value the category. The study, thus, adds nuance to our understanding of markets and categories.

With film sales markets becoming increasingly popular events where the film business gathers several times each year, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that they should be understood as events where important gatekeeping process are taking place. That is to say, sales markets are the point where important decisions about films are made, where sales agencies negotiate access to international markets, and where they exert influence over the sort of access given to specific films.

Drawing on qualitative methods such as participant observation and interviews, the author develops a case study of the European Film Market (EFM) in Berlin. The author analyses value creation processes at the EFM, focussing specifically on the disposition of exhibition space and the importance of film screenings.

Drawing on the literature about tournaments of value, the author demonstrates that sales markets endow films with significant values, exercising a powerful role over the process of enabling cultural flow. The author also demonstrates that there is a symbiotic relationship between the EFM sales market and the Berlin International Film Festival, providing a context from which films can generate attention.

The author provides new insights into film sales processes within sales markets, and the role of sales agents in influencing such processes. The author argues that sales markets exert an important influence over gatekeeping by creating social and cultural hierarchies that impact on the sales process of films.

Now in its third year, The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival is fast becoming a significant cultural annual event, which aims to achieve social change through the arts. Through innovative programming of arts events, the Festival explores the relationship between mental health and creativity, celebrates the artistic achievements of people with experience of mental health issues, and promotes positive mental health and well‐being. It aims to promote the rights and recovery of people who experience mental ill health, while exploring mental health and inequalities that affect us all. The multi‐arts Festival focuses on audiences' existing interests in film, theatre, comedy, music, literature and visual arts to tackle stigma and engage people.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Lai Heua Fai, Festival of Light, as a place making ritual in the world heritage town of Luang Prabang, a former royal capital of the Lao-speaking kingdom. It compares this centuries-old traditional festival with a very new place making festival, the Luang Prabang Film Festival which began only six years ago.

Sense of place theorization has developed considerably in recent decades as a number of discourses have co-mingled and as social and cultural research has embraced space/place as a crucial component of knowledge production. The study explores place making in a globalized, post-modern and post-colonial world. Fieldwork was undertaken in Luang Prabang between 2008 and 2016 including interviews, observations, photographic recording and participation, leading up to the 2013 celebration of Lai Heua Fai and the 2015 film festival.

Lai Heua Fai and the Luang Prabang Film Festival are spatial practices that represent the places they evoke. Both these events connect the past, the present and the future in place. The authors argue that separating “events” from “place” sets up a dichotomy that is problematic and unsustainable on many levels: perceptually, as a lived experience, epistemologically and analytically.

The authors suggest that these two identity forming events, in the life of Luang Prabang, herald “place” and “place making” as ongoing dynamic processes of construction and re-construction where the “traditional” and the “contemporary” are constantly re-constituted as markers, in the case of this research, of Luang Prabangan identity and place attachment.

The purpose of the paper is to test the perceived economic, socio-cultural and environmental impacts on the satisfaction of local residents with the Zanzibar International Film Festival.

Structured questionnaires were administered to 299 local Zanzibaris, to obtain the data necessary for hypotheses testing using Structural Equation Modelling through Smart PLS 3.0.

The findings reveal that locals' perceptions related to economic, cultural, environmental and pride impacts of the festival had greater positive significant effects on the level of satisfaction of local residents compared to image, entertainment and social impacts.

The findings uphold the utility of Social Exchange Theory in explaining local residents' perceptions of the festival. The results contribute to the existing literature on festivals by affirming the multidimensional nature of their social consequences.

Managerially, the results shed light on possible areas to be improved by festival promoters from both the public and private sectors in enhancing the positive perceptions held by local residents as well as improving festivals in the area or similar context.

The study expands the Triple Bottom Line dimensions of sustainability in the festival context by adding pride, entertainment and image perceived value.

Movies critics believe that the diversity of Iranian cinematic genres has decreased over time. The paper aims to answer the following questions: What is the impact of the continuous cooperation between the key nodes on the audience's taste, uniformity of the cinematic genres and the box office? Is there any relationship between the importance of actors in the actors' network and their popularity?

In the artistic world, artists' relationships lead to a network that affects individuals' commercial or artistic success and defines the artwork's value. To study the issue that the diversity of Iranian cinematic genres has decreased over time, the authors utilized social network analysis (SNA), in which every actor is considered a node, and its collaboration with others in the same movies is depicted via edges. After preparing the desired dataset, networks were generated, and metrics were calculated. First, the authors compared the structure of the network with the box office. The results illustrated that the network density growth negatively affects box office. Second, network key nodes were identified, their relationships with other actors were inspected using the Apriori algorithm to examine the density cause and the cinematic genre of key nodes, and their followers were investigated. Finally, the relationship between the actors' Instagram follower count and their importance in the network structure was analyzed to answer whether the generated network is acceptable in society.

The social problem genre has stabilized due to continuous cooperation between the core nodes because network density negatively impacts the box office. As well as, the generated network in the cinema is acceptable by the audience because there is a positive correlation between the importance of actors in the network and their popularity.

The novelty of this paper is investigating the issue raised in the cinema industry and trying to inspect its aspects by utilizing the SNA to deepen the cinematic research and fill the gaps. This study demonstrates a positive correlation between the actors' Instagram follower count and their importance in the network structure, indicating that people follow those central in the actors' network. As well as investigating the network key nodes with a heuristic algorithm using coreness centrality and analyzing their relationships with others through the Apriori algorithm. The authors situated the analysis using a novel and original dataset from the Iranian actors who participated in the Fajr Film Festival from 1998 to 2020.

The purpose of this paper is to unfold factors anchored in visitors’ experiences possibly determinant of the success or failure of cultural festivals.

The studied data included 931 experience descriptions, 23 interviews and 51 empathy-based stories collected from 17 cultural festivals around Finland during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The nature of the study was exploratory, the theoretical framework was social constructionism, and the analysis was done using Foucauldian discourse analysis. The Method of Empathy Based Stories, a non-active role-playing technique, was used in the data collection.

The identified success factors were the programme, good quality food, sense of community, chill-out opportunities and building blocks of one’s identity. The factors that might cause failures were commercialised and low-quality programme, the low quality of services, commercialism demonstrated by elevated ticket and service pricing, VIP services confronting egalitarianism, crowd control and queueing and anti-social behaviour.

Three areas of particular interest were: how to nurture identity construction and personal well-being, how to enhance egalitarianism within the festival community, and how to promote the desired code of conduct without applying unnecessary rules and restrictions. If successful in these, the festival could boast of features that are not easy to replicate and that could create a competitive edge.

Empathy-based stories combined with discourse analysis contributed new insights on the issues of the success and failure of festivals. The empathy-based stories were particularly useful in retrieving informants’ perceptions of the future and for identifying factors that might cause failures.