Place your bets, all bets are off!Film festivals as devices for the construction and management of uncertainty for distributors and arthouse cinemas

International audienceThis chapter will examine how film festivals allow distributors to connect with cinema operators to (re)organize their collaborations during the year and allow adjustments in their trade relations. Here, film festivals are analysed as negotiating spaces and event able to decrease or to restore the uncertainty that characterizes the movie market, not only as places promoting and renewing "business as usual". Based on a qualitative ethnographic survey conducted mainly at different editions of the Cannes and Les Arcs Summit festivals, rounded out by interviews with festival organizers, film distributors or sub-distributors, and cinema operators, this text shows that, with the help of the film festivals, all bets are off later and later in the movie market