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FILM FESTIVALS: CULTURE, PEOPLE, AND POWER ON THE GLOBAL SCREEN By Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011. 328 pp. $28.95 paper.

Despite abundant research on public spheres, reception theory, and media studies, the academic examination of film festivals remains relatively uncharted territory. Since 2008, scholars behind the Film Festival Research Network (www.film festivalresearch.org) have compiled a growing list of monographs, essays, and programmer interviews—a list of resources largely from the past few years. So it was with much anticipation that Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong’s Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen emerged to present a broad study in this niche field. Wong’s book addresses film festivals as “global phenomena” (4) examining the interplay between auteurs, filmic texts, and the cultural, economic, and often political festivals that showcase them. She approaches festivals as an interdisciplinary study incorporating cultural and ethnographic studies, the notion of public sphere and counterpublics, and French structuralist methodology (19–20). Perhaps, due to the relative tabula rasa of the field, Wong takes on a lot here—she does not confine her study either by geographic region or theoretical approach. Although ambitious, her goal is to provide a “roadmap” (228) for the nascent study of film festivals; as such, it is an admirable contribution to the field. Wong first establishes a historical context, tracing festivals back to the first film societies through the initial inception of Venice and Cannes to what is now an international arena of hundreds of festivals across the globe. Regardless of initial inspiration, she notes, each festival attempts to balance a complex array of influences from Hollywood, corporate sponsors, press, and audience against its own organizational, artistic, cultural, and political vision. As Wong delves into the films showcased through festivals, she attempts to answer an intriguing, yet problematic, question: Is there a genre for “festival films”? Limiting her definition to feature-length narrative films from top-tier festivals, she first attempts to articulate what festival films are not: mainstream Hollywood movies. Yet, even here she must allow exceptions, since numerous “crossover” films (e.g., Pulp Fiction and Brokeback Mountain) link the seemingly unbridgeable gap between festival and Hollywood success. Regardless, she argues, most festival films are “serious” (74) films that “tend to avoid big, expensive productions in favor of stark minimalism” (75), favoring long shots or handhelds to emphasize the film’s naturalness. They “privilege the suggestive, evocative, spare, and nonlinear” (79) and embrace the complex polemical subjects that Hollywood avoids. Perhaps her most salient point is that festival films define the new, since an emblematic trait of a successful festival film is its ability to change the course of independent filmmaking, future festival selections, and even ensuing Hollywood productions. In analyzing the “extratextual elements” of the festival film—the auteurs, critics and canons—she argues that auteurs both form, and are formed by, festivals (100–128). Festivals often create their own canons, privileging the work of filmmakers that they, themselves, have discovered. Michael Moore, who won at Cannes for Bowling for Columbine, has since screened numerous films at the festival, including Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko. Festivals, especially toptier festivals, as much as they aim (and claim) to represent the new, more often choose to play it safe, in a less constrained way than Hollywood perhaps, but constrained nonetheless. Perhaps the most unique and important contribution of Wong’s book comes in her chapter on festivals as public spheres. She examines how festivals “promote cinemas that articulate different experiences and expressions” and, as such, become alternative public spheres or counterpublics where “ideas, oftentimes repressed or ignored in larger contexts, are exchanged and explored” (160). Festivals in their heterogeneity become a multiplicity of subaltern publics. Film festivals, Wong argues, both transform public spaces literally, by embedding within the theaters, streets and eateries of a locality, as well as discursively, by bringing complex, controversial films into the public arena for “open and informed debates” (163). The heart of Wong’s insight here emerges in her question: “[W]hose ideas are articulated in film festivals and by whom?” (165). Intrinsically linked to (and dependent on) the global commercial film industry, festivals may provide an alternative distribution channel for difficult-tomarket independent films, yet they often still uphold and maintain a certain hegemony. In providing a “roadmap” to the study of film festivals, Wong greatly succeeds. Through case studies, she bases her argument in the tangible world of films, directors, and festivals, and she provides compelling research on the aesthetics, politics, and business that comprise the festival arena. Despite the breadth of her topic, she also succeeds at a depth of study—most notably in the history of festivals and in its imbrication within the public sphere. One aspect missing from the book is more front-and-center examination of the exclusivity and discriminatory practices of festivals—for example, she notes that most of Cannes’s winning directors since 1949 have been European, and only one was female (93). Although not mentioned in the book, Martha Lauzen’s study Independent Women: Behind-the-Scenes Representation on Festival Films would be relevant here. In analyzing twenty-five film festivals, including Sundance and Tribeca, Lauzen found that women consisted of thirty-nine percent of documentary film directors and only eighteen percent of narrative feature directors. Although Wong notes that men “outnumber women in all aspects of film festivals (save audience)” (163), she does not press further. Are women making fewer films than men? Or does the fact that festival staffs and juries are dominated by men negatively impact women directors’ chances of acceptance into festivals? With festivals now the gate-keepers deciding the fate of individual filmmakers and their films, one wonders what types of aesthetically and politically challenging films are being turned away, not only from Hollywood, but from festivals as well. Of course, Wong’s key point is that film festivals deserve more academic attention. Considering the complex interplay between local and global; art and commerce; and film, auteur, and event—film festivals provide an array of issues that can source profound and diverse studies. Just as film festivals provide a launching pad for films, this book offers the groundwork and inspiration for building on what will ultimately become the rich field of film festival studies.