Screening World Cinema at Film Festivals: Festivalization and (Staged) Authenticity

This chapter examines the screening of world cinema at film festivals. Festival circulation has developed in the second half of the twentieth century as one of the main ways of bringing alternative films to global audiences. While festivals’ dedication to world cinema has been valuable as a force against cultural homogenization throughout the decades, it is argued that with the advent of globalization and the increasing commodification of culture in the 1990s, festivals progressively doubled as marketing instruments. The case of the Australian film Tanna (2015, Australia, Bentley Dean and Martin Butler) illustrates how notions of authenticity are articulated and appropriated for various aims on the festival circuit.