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The first edition of the Antalya Golden Orange International Film Festival was launched fifty years ago in 1964, at a time when the international success of the director Metin Erksan ignited national support for the creation of a Turkish film festival. Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival has primarily been a national film festival, despite occasional claims to internationality. The history of the festival is also tainted by political aspirations. Antalya’s rivalry with the Golden Boll Film Festival in neighboring Adana provides an interesting case study for understanding the ways in which tensions between political parties and municipalities may affect film festival organisation.

Alternative Film/Video Belgrade began as a festival of Yugoslav alternative film and video production, with the aim to document and define trends in film theory as well as to identify the values and new creative possibilities in the field. The themes of the festival often set a mandate for exploring various aspects of the term ‘alternative’. This term has been included as the name of the festival since its founding in 1982. In this aspect, ‘alternative’ included many kinds of alternative modes – from experimental, art, short, and radical film, to film reflection and other forms.

Subverting the usual touristic signifiers of Scottishness – tartanry, whisky, and so on – THE ANGELS‘ SHARE (Loach, 2012) follows four young people from Glasgow’s impoverished East End as they embark on what might be considered a victimless crime in the north of Scotland. Predominantly comic in tone, the film was shot in 2011 and received its world premiere at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. I attended the festival as part of a research project tracking the film’s journey from initial concept and screenplay through the production process and into exhibition, distribution, and reception.

The Busan International Film Festival, based in the South Korean harbor city, is one of the biggest and most important film festivals in Asia and a powerful and innovative newcomer on the international film festival circuit.1 Within only 15 years Busan has become a festival operating much like bigger festivals such as Berlinale and Cannes, featuring competitions, a national/regional showcase, a market (Asian Film Market), a co-production market (Asian Project Market/APM, formerly known as Pusan Promotion Plan/PPP), a film school component (Asian Film Academy), and a film fund (Asian Cinema Fund).

On a sunny August afternoon in Amsterdam, Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network met cultural analyst, festival programmer, and filmmaker Eliza Steinbock (currently working as a lecturer and researcher at Maastricht University). The discussion ranged from Amsterdam-based transgender film festivals to issues of precarity in activist film festivals and the politics of representation in trans*[1] cinema culture.

In struggles for political and cultural recognition many Indigenous groups employ visual media to make their concerns heard. Amongst these various channels for media activism are Indigenous film festivals which, in the words of festival coordinator Amalia Cόrdova, work to convey ‘a sense of solidarity with Indigenous struggles’. Cόrdova’s essay on Indigenous film festivals appears in the collection Film Festivals and Activism (2012). In the introduction to the collection co-editor Leshu Torchin writes about activist festivals as testimonial encounters or fields of witnessing where the films offer testimony and the audiences serve as witnessing publics, ‘viewers [who] take responsibility for what they have seen and become ready to respond’. To better understand how Indigenous film festivals embody these activist imperatives as eco-activism I consider the case of the 2011 Native American Film and Video Festival (NAFVF) with its special eco-themed focus Mother Earth in Crisis. In my analysis of NAFVF I consider both the testimonies of the films and the festival context in which they are placed; by doing so I add to the growing scholarship in ecocinema studies which within the last ten years has become a legitimate and crucial aspect of ecocriticism’s purview – though surprisingly, with little attention devoted to film festivals. Through this analysis, by articulating what I term the oblique testimony, I argue that Indigenous film festivals are often strongly reflective of the environmental concerns and hopes of Native peoples and suggest ecological engagements that place them in the terrain of environmental film festivals. [excerpt]

The Festival of Central and Eastern European Film Wiesbaden, also known as ‘goEast’, is a key event on the German film festival calendar. This is perhaps in no small part due to the fact that the festival is organised by the Deutsches Filminstitut, also because it enjoys a dedicated following among enthusiasts of the larger, general festival community. GoEast is structured by a modestly-sized feature film competition section which also includes documentaries. The total number of titles in this section in 2013 was 17. There are a number of smaller special programs at the festival, including a retrospective homage to a master cineaste and a multi-part symposium.

There are 11 days in September when the world’s cinematic community turns to Canada for the glitz and glamour of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). The streets are flooded with both lay and professional attendees taking in movies, meetings, and the charms of this North American metropolis. However, while there are thousands of people attending the festival, they are a small portion of the millions of people who can now access the glamour of the festival through countless virtual venues online. Whether it is a popular media outlet that posts reviews and tweets headlines to its followers or an individual film fan who posts a picture of himself on the red carpet for all his friends and family to envy, online platforms and social media have had a major impact on festival structure and experience.