Who’s Choice? Who’s Voice? Can Festival Programmers and Film Critics Stand Away from the Market Diktats but not from Societal Issues?

Abstract

This paper aims to emphasize first the decisive role played by festivals in the creation and circulation of films according to other guidelines than those dictated by the market. With different tools, programmers and critics are the main agents of this inevitably asymmetric but nevertheless vital endless battle. In this context, this paper unfolds the necessary and sometimes counterintuitive strategies to remove the dominance of an archaic power built through decades (actually, since the origins of cinema) of masculine and euro-centrist definition of the art of cinema. This necessary purpose must be pursued without destroying the level of demand in terms of originality and ability to keep re-interrogating political, social et esthetical frames and therefore to resist the submission to pre-established market oriented or militant/propaganda patterns that constantly intends to overwhelm filmmaking and film viewing.