Socioeconomic factors of national representation in the global film festival circuit: skewed toward the large and wealthy, but small countries can beat the odds

Abstract

This study analyzes how economic, demographic, and geographic factors predict the representation of different countries in the global film festival circuit. It relies on the combination of several open-access databases, including festival programming information from the Cinando platform of the Cannes Film Market. The dataset consists of over 20,000 unique films from almost 600 festivals across the world over a decade, a total of more than 30,000 film-festival entries. It is shown that while films from large affluent countries indeed dominate the festival screen, the bias is nevertheless not fully proportional to the large demographic and economic worldwide disparities and that several smaller countries perform better than expected. Further computational simulations demonstrate how much including films from smaller countries contributes to cultural diversity, and how countries vary in cultural "trade balance" dynamics, revealing differences between net exporters and importers of festival films. This research underscores the importance of representation in film festivals and the public value of increasing cultural diversity. The data-driven insights and quantitative approaches to festival programming and cultural event analytics are hoped to be useful for both the academic community as well as film festival organizers and policymakers aiming to foster more inclusive and diverse cultural landscapes.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Mapping the film festivals and production countries across the globe. Panel A shows the volume of film-festival pair entries in the database (indicating one or more screenings at a given festival) in the circuit from a given country, and festival locations as green dots (placed over country capitals). Panels B and C are stacked bar charts, showing the cumulative number of pairs and hosted events by country, respectively. Both stacks are dominated by the USA and France, followed by a long tail of less prominent production and host countries. The smaller countries with lesser shares are explored on subsequent graphs.
• Figure 2: Representational equality in the global film festival circuit. Panels A and B on the left depict the circuit distributions (densities) and averages (black bars) in 2012-2021 for population and GDP per capita of production countries (each underlying data point is a festival listing of a film from from a given country), and the two models of balance as horizontal lines (see text for discussion). Note that the axes are logarithmic, and the bars are means of log-scaled values. The small panels in C, aligned with the axes of panels A and B, illustrate these values over time for a selection of individual festivals; the first three are FIAPF-accredited competitive event series, while Sundance and BACIFI (Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival) are not. The graph shows most festivals stay relatively stable in terms of the average population size and affluence of production countries of films that get selected.
• Figure 3: Three perspectives of festival film producing countries. Panel A has all the countries arranged by population and GDP per capita, with size indicating the number of film-festival pairs. As expected, the optimum is a wealthy economy and large population, while large African and Asian countries remain very much underrepresented. Panel B compares the number of film-festival pairs in the Cinando dataset and the UIS feature film production estimates in the overlapping period, showing they roughly correlate. Panel C shows the population on the x-axis and the residuals from the representation prediction model on the vertical: countries above the zero line occur more often than would be expected on average, while those below do worse given their population, GDP per capita, and other factors discussed in the text. Note that the Cinando dataset counts are based on 2012-2021 data on panels A and C, and 2011-2017 on panel B, to match the UIS data used in the latter.
• Figure 4: The flow of films between production countries and festival-hosting countries. Panel A depicts the export share of festival films normalized by production countries (rows). Panel B displays the export-import balance on the horizontal axis on a $\log_2$ or multiplicative scale (not taking into account domestic screenings of domestic films), against the share of domestic film selections at domestic festivals on the vertical axis, for all countries with at least 5 hosted festival events in the database. The largest producer, France, also imports more than it exports, i.e. more foreign films occur in its festivals than its own films are selected at festivals abroad.
• Figure 5: Film exchange flows of selected countries. These "star networks" only show links between a given central country and countries where its films are showcased at festivals (outgoing arrows) or whose films are shown in its festivals. The line color and size are relative, with the thickest being the largest link in terms of either in- or outgoing film appearances. To maintain legibility, only those countries accounting for about a fifth of the imports-exports are shown for each country, the rest grouped as "Others". As already seen above, some countries like France have strong internal festival circuits, visible as the loops in the network, while others export either in a focused or spread-out manner.