A documentary film festival circuit and film festivals as field-configuring events, adapting to digitalization : "...to get together and to really talk about strategies,"

This Master thesis of 30 ECTS credits, discusses the role and function of film festivals within the film industry. The objective of this project was to explore whether there exists a specific documentary film festival circuit that professionals travel on, and, furthermore, to cast light on how these professionals choose the film festivals and the competition that exists between film festivals. Another goal was to clarify the role of film festivals and their financing forums in the field of documentary films. A qualitative, semi-structured interview study was conducted, where international decision makers attending the Nordisk Forum 2010 were interviewed. The main results are that there exists a documentary film festival circuit and the festivals compete for the attendance of professionals by positioning themselves uniquely in this market and in a strategic place in the calendar year. The film festival forums have an important role as field-configuring events, as they are sites for networking and to learn of new developments in the world of documentaries for professionals. Film festivals thrive on the interplay between artistic, cultural institutional logics and commercial institutional logics. This interplay appears in a number of different themes within this field: 1. Subsidized film culture versus non-subsidized film culture. 2. Highbrow creative documentaries versus mainstream TV slot and/or contentdriven documentaries. 3. Interactive cross-media approaches versus mainstream TV slot approaches. Efforts of integrating the logics of the experimental cross-media approaches and TV slot approaches seem to be the evolvement in the USA. Films are viewed as content, regardless of platforms. The role of the film festivals in the evolution of the field is to resolve conflicts between two institutional logics, the artistic ones and the commercial ones. They are sites where conflicts between field members both come up and are resolved