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Specially commissioned text for the hundredth anniversary issue of one of the oldest film journals in the world, KWARTALNYK FILMOWY In order to understand the way a film festival operates, one has to switch the attention away from films, especially in the case of the glamour-driven festivals with their focus on red carpet, photo-ops etc. Films matter, but it is a wide range of other factors that must be scrutinised in order to understand what gives a film festival its distinctiveness. One needs to analyse the unique configuration of a festival’s stakeholders, to study how the film festival structures and narrates itself, what its components are, what constitutes the play of power between its participants (sponsors, partners, board members, guests, audiences, venues, journalists, and so on). It is this specific configuration, the relation between all players that pursue different agendas, that largely determines what will be the selection of films, their importance in the general context of the event, which filmmakers will be invited, what concurrent events will there be, what will be the social programme, the marketing, the media coverage sought. All these elements, taken together, give the festival a unique profile and create the festival’s “narrative”. Iordanova uses the examples of Cannes and some big Asian festivals to show how these mechanisms operate. Publisher PDF