Introduction - Shaping Film Festivals In a Changing World:Practice and Methods

This is an introductory section to the edited volume Shaping Film Festivals In a Changing World: Practice and Methods. This volume is a collective attempt on the part of a community of academics, film festival curators, and archivists to come to terms with practical and intellectual challenges of the pandemic and post-pandemic realities affecting cultures of film festivals. The collection draws contours of critical inquiry orienting current film festival research and practice to explore new directions in archiving and decolonizing practices and big data analysis in the post-Covid-19 context and beyond. The four-part study gathers the voices of academics and practitioners who engage in a dialogue to articulate critical areas for both study and practice of film festivals, and identifies conceptual tools to address them: “Archival Turn,” “Decolonizing Film Festival Studies,” “Post-Covid-19 and Film Festival Studies” and “Data Visualization and Film Festival Research and Practice.”