Film festival coverage: an interview with journalists, critics, and event programmers of Latin American film festivals

Abstract

Film festivals are places of encounter where different social actors come together, including professionals from the audio-visual industry, students, film buffs, and journalists, as well as the figures who organise these events. The aim of this research is to describe the journalistic coverage of film festivals carried out by the Ibero-American media, which is composed of generalist, traditional, specialised, and digital native outlets. The authors have used a qualitative methodology based on semi-structured interviews with film journalists and festival managers. The most significant findings reveal that each journalist develops their own particular type of frame building to cover an event, which is subject to the informative agenda of the media through which they are commissioned. At the same time, new actors such as influencers have also appeared, who report on the festivals as well. In addition, the festivals themselves have created their own platforms in order to fill the information gap resulting from the failure of the specialised press to report on certain aspects of these events. As a result, the authors conclude that festivals have become media hubs where different types of content generators converge, and in which they offer a diversity of information thanks to the technological facilities offered by digitisation, the Internet, and social media.