Film festivals often get a bad rep. We’ve all heard the stereotype before: they are elitist and out of touch, filled with arrogant critics watching the most obscure of movies in exclusive, luxurious cinemas. The OxStu even ran a piece about this perceived pretentiousness in 2012; if a director wants festival success, an anti-Cannes crusader writes, what they ‘ought to have made was a slow black and white film about German Protestantism.’ But it is a false binary that holds up these views: the idea that festival movies are just for the ivory tower, and commercial blockbusters are accessible, democratic cinema. Maybe Tony Stark is a man of the people, after all! But with any sort of inspection, this dichotomy crumbles, and we can see the important role of these events for the entertainment industry.
Before I go any further, though, I have a confession: I am a film festival aficionado. I love getting to see movies early, reading reviews as soon as the embargos are lifted, and joining in on the buzz around a particularly riveting watch. I am also the upcoming director for the 2026 Oxford University Short Film Festival (happening this Hilary! You should come!) and president of Oxford University Filmmaking Foundation. But before you dismiss my arguments as mere cinephile ramblings, I need to tell you that I got placed a laughable number 14,733 at the queue for tickets at the recent BFI London Film Festival.
So I do have a bone to pick. And a claim to neutrality!
Still, to paint Cannes, Sundance, or Venice as some sort of resistance to ‘the market’ (I wish!) betrays a lack of knowledge of how these events actually work. Festivals are inherently commercial. Not only do big action movies play out of competition in festivals all the time, but the events are designed to facilitate film sales to distributors. When OUFF interviews independent filmmakers, for example, our guests often talk of festivals as a busy time in their lives not because of the amount of movies they watched—but the amount of meetings they had to take to sell their movie. Here, distributors are looking for the awards players and viral film twitter gems, movies that will bring them money through their cultural cachet.
Despite the box-office obsession underpinning it, this is a good thing: festivals are a platform to champion independent and world cinema, and have allowed underrepresented films to be watched by increasingly bigger audiences. A lot of movies that went on to be at the center of the cultural conversation and had great box office performances had their start at a festival. The Worst Person in the World? Snagged by Neon at Cannes. Past Lives? A24 at Sundance. I’m Still Here? Sony Pictures Classics at Venice. Conversely, the movies that skip the festival season completely are the ones that have the security of a well-established filmmaker behind them or a giant studio machine banking on their success (think Oppenheimer or, more recently, One Battle After Another). Not looking so democratic now, huh! But to prejudge quality based on how a movie found a distributor is just silly: ‘festival’ or ‘straight to theatre’ movies are not good or bad because of the path they took to reach our screens. Movies just need different launchpads, and that is okay!
What worries me the most is this aversion to ‘pretension’ that underlies criticisms of festivals. Pretentious often just means foreign or challenging. And anti-pretension is born out of a lack of confidence in the audience: be it a skepticism in their willingness to read subtitles, to appreciate an innovative film technique, or to welcome new talent on and behind the screen. This is not only anti-intellectual, but extremely patronizing to the ‘standard viewer.’ As the entertainment industry gets increasingly risk-averse and formulaic, festivals find themselves in a unique position of demanding respect for the audience and making sure they have the choice to watch all kinds of cinema. This is far from an anti-commercial endeavor: they are simply supplying the consumer with choice. But always a choice with good prospects—for better or for worse.
Currently, festivals are not fulfilling all their ‘pretentious’ potential. They are the best we have got and fulfill an incredibly important role, but this does not mean that commercial or political concerns are ignored once the lights dim in the theatre. Box office keeps getting in the way of audience access to independent and world cinema. Just think of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which played the Berlinale but failed to secure worldwide distribution. So many important stories are left for only festival audiences to see due to a blind service to an imaginary idea of what an audience wants—even in these supposed altars to obscure cinema.
So, yeah, give me the slow black and white film about Lutheranism. I say, let pretentiousness run rampant. We could use more of it!
