Extract

The international film festival often appears to function as a cosmopolitan space in which spectators are encouraged to participate in a kind of concentrated cultural tour of the world; it is also a space that regulates – in accordance with various social, economic, political and cultural forces – what is allowed to flow through it. Apart from celebrating individual films and directors, festivals often showcase various bodies of work defined as cinema emerging from particular nations, more usually referred to as ‘national cinemas’.1 This essay offers some initial thoughts on how the structures, conditions and contexts of festivals can impact on the films that emerge from them – films which may sometimes be seen as representative of a particular national cinema. Rather than address how national cinemas are represented in the festival circuit, however, I explore the limits of constituting the national in a manner which fails to take into account the contingencies of festival histories and hierarchies in the politics of film selection.

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