Quantifying the global film festival circuit: Networks, diversity, and public value creation

Introduction

Film festivals are key components of the global film industry. They set trends, create publicity, provide trade opportunities, and facilitate collaboration. This paper presents a novel quantitative analysis of the global film festival network, focusing on six continents and 11 countries using 13 years of longitudinal festival data and applying network analysis and a vector embedding approach to characterize festivals quantitatively and comparable units. The metrics computed and visualized here provide a first glance into the global festival landscape, longitudinal trends, and measurement of diversity across various social, cultural, and geographic variables. The analysis contributes to the public value generation theory, aids researchers in better understanding industry dynamics, and helps organizers, policymakers, and industry actors make more informed, data-driven decisions.

Results

We analyze a global film festival network using 13 years of longitudinal festival data from 2009 to 2021, characterized by 616 festivals and 31,989 unique films. We propose festival embeddings as a way to represent continuous latent vector spaces of film festivals, showcasing how the programming content changes over time and predicting festival connections. Our results reveal niche-occupying festival types, diverse series that evolve over time, and a global festival network partitioned into strongly connected components. We discuss how these quantitative findings relate to research on public value generation and cultural diversity in the film industry.

Discussion

This quantitative, longitudinal, and cross-regional study of film festivals contributes to the public value generation theory, aiding researchers in better understanding industry dynamics and helping organizers, policymakers, and industry actors make more informed, data-driven decisions. Our results reveal niche-occupying festival types, diverse series that evolve over time, and a global festival network partitioned into strongly connected components. We discuss how these findings relate to cultural diversity and iterate on the limitations and further implications of our study.

Conclusions

This study offers a novel quantitative analysis of the global film festival network, characterized by 616 festivals and 31,989 unique films from 2009 to 2021. Our network analysis and vector embedding approach provide a first glance into the global festival landscape, longitudinal trends, and measurement of diversity across various social, cultural, and geographic variables. This work aids researchers in better understanding industry dynamics and helps organizers, policymakers, and industry actors make more informed, data-driven decisions. We conclude that our proposed methodological approach to festival data paves the way for more comprehensive film festival studies and large-scale quantitative cultural event analytics.