Film festivals on the small screen: Audiences, domestic space, and everyday media

Abstract

This chapter offers a conceptual framework to theorize film festival audiences as festivals have shifted to digital forms of exhibition as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that any account of online film festival audiences should take into consideration the relationship between film festival viewing and other media practices. From mediascapes (Alasuutari 1999) and media ecologies (Fuller 2005) to media convergence (Jenkins 2006) and transmedia studies (Guynes & Hassler-Forest 2018), a whole host of researchers have argued that media practices are best understood at the intersection between a constellation of technologies, platforms, and devices rather than in isolation. Accordingly, we suggest that existing film festival research on audiences can be enriched by perspectives from television studies and research on other domestic and everyday media.