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

Abstract

Film festivals are meeting spaces where various players from the audiovisual industry, students, film enthusiasts, journalists, and the organizers themselves converge. This research aims to describe the experiences in journalistic coverage of film festivals for media outlets: generalist, specialized, and digital native in Ibero-America. To achieve this, a qualitative approach was applied through semi-structured interviews with film journalists and festival managers. The results reveal that each journalist applies their framebuilding to cover the event, which is subject to the informational agenda of the media commissioning them. New agents have also emerged who communicate about festivals, such as influencers; furthermore, festivals have created their own platforms to cover informational gaps that specialized press does not report on the festival. Therefore, it is concluded that festivals are media epicenters where different types of content generators currently converge, diversifying the informational offer thanks to the technological facilities offered by digitization, the internet, and social media.