Chilean Film Festivals and Local Audiences: Going Online?

Abstract

This chapter reviews the impact of the global pandemic of Covid-19 on Chilean film festivals and how this affected their relationship with local audiences. Chilean festivals are small events that exist under precarious conditions, facing different economic and cultural challenges that complicate their stability. After the Chilean estallido (a social outburst in 2019), the current health crisis has further affected their position, due to their cancelation and/or postponement, and most of them have temporarily transformed into online events to ensure their survival. We provide an overview on how Covid-19 has affected festivals in Chile as well as their responses to this crisis, which we understand within a particular context that has been pressuring onsite exhibitions and collective viewing. We mapped and tracked the festivals’ activities throughout 2020 and 2021 and used online ethnographic methods to observe some cases more closely, conducting participant observation of online activities and interviewing festival organizers. As such, the chapter addresses some of the new ways in which film festivals developed to engage with their audiences during the pandemic. We conclude with an emphasis on festivals’ responses as adaptive strategies and poses some questions on the future developments of these events.