Welcome to the website of the Film Festival Research Network!
The Film Festival Research Network (FFRN) is a loose connection of scholars working on issues related to film festivals, founded by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck in 2008. The FFRN aims to make festival research more available, to connect its diverse aspects and to foster interdisciplinary exchange between researchers as well as festival professionals. To achieve this goal, we gathered the available material in a bibliography, put researchers in contact with each other at conferences and encourage communication via a mailing list.
In a first step, we gathered all academic sources in the field that we could find and made them searchable by compiling a thematic annotated bibliography on film festival research. The first edition appeared in December 2008, the second edition dated 22 January 2010 is available online. The first volumes of the Film Festival Yearbook series, edited by Dina Iordanova and her colleagues at St. Andrews, has featured the bibliography, its updates and further information on the field as a resource in print (2009-2012). A peer-reviewed annotated Festival Studies bibliography became available from Oxford Bibliographies Online in 2013. With the FFRN website in place, the bibliography has found a home on our site: see the middle tab in the navigation FFRN Bibliograhy. We update the bibliography frequently (last 11 June 2025) and welcome suggestions and additions: just email us!
Then, we put researchers in contact with one another and organize pre-constituted panels at conferences, such as NECS and SCMS. As the network is growing, new meeting places and infrastructures are created. There are two workgroups of the FFRN: the Film Festival Research work group within the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Within the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) a Scholarly Interest Group (SIG) for Film and Media Festivals has been established. Dedicated panels and workshops organized through the FFRN have also taken place at other prominent conferences such as Screen or ECREA.
Furthermore, we wish to help festival researchers to be in contact and exchange ideas about their work. Beyond the information available on this website, interested festival researchers and festival organizers can share information and start a conversation on the FFRN mailing list. You can subscribe to the mailing list here.
If you have questions about the Film Festival Research Network, want to contribute to the bibliography or post something to the site, please feel free to contact us at: info@filmfestivalresearch.org.
Contact
Skadi Loist is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the Department of Art and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. Skadi has lead several international research projects, including Film Circulation of films on the festival circuit (BMBF 2017-22) and GEP Analysis on gender equity policies in the German, British and Canadian screen industries (DFG/ESRC/SSHRC 2021-24). Skadi serves on the editorial board of NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies and the advisory board of Journal of Festive Studies. They co-edited several books and special issues, e.g. of Bildschön: 20 Jahre Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg (2009), Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (2016), “Queer/ing Film Festivals” (special issue of Studies in European Cinemas 15:1, 2018). (Contact: skadi@filmfestivalresearch.org)
Marijke de Valck is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She is the author of Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (2007), co-editor of Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (2016) and editor of the series Framing Film Festivals for Palgrave Macmillan. (Contact: marijke@filmfestivalresearch.org). Together with Antoine Damiens and Diane Burgess, Marijke is section editor for the Festival Review section of the online open-access, peer-review journal NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies and welcomes submissions of festival reviews (guidelines here).
(Last updated: 11 June 2025)