We should talk about what's actually happening at places like Locarno, Venice, and Berlin when they hand out their most prestigious awards. Not the speeches or the dreams realized, but the structural incentive they've created. These festivals reward a very specific type of cinema: the kind that travels well to other festivals, plays well with international juries, and ultimately serves the festival circuit more than it serves the filmmaking ecosystems that produced it.
This matters because the festivals have become the primary gatekeepers for which international films reach global audiences. That's their stated mission, their prestige, their entire reason for existing. But the mechanism by which they operate actively discourages the messy, locally-rooted, commercially risky work that actually sustains cinema in smaller countries and regions.
Consider what happens when a young filmmaker from a small nation wins a major award. Within months, they're fielding meetings from international distributors, agents, and producers who want them to make the "next" thing. The pressure to replicate their award-winning formula is intense. The infrastructure to make challenging work in one's home country suddenly feels less appealing than access to larger production budgets and international crews. The filmmaker becomes a product for consumption by the global festival circuit, not a voice emerging from a specific cinematic tradition.
Meanwhile, back in their country of origin, the film school graduate who didn't win anything has to figure out how to fund their second feature. The ecosystem that might have supported them through domestic exhibition, television deals, or regional production companies has been hollowed out. All the attention, all the international finance, all the prestige has flowed upward through the festival hierarchy.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. Filmmakers learn quickly that if they want to succeed, they should make work designed for international festival audiences. That often means employing certain aesthetic choices, narrative structures, and thematic concerns that play across cultural borders. It sounds reasonable until you realize you're essentially asking Icelandic, Portuguese, and Taiwanese filmmakers to speak in a universal festival language rather than in their own contexts.
The festivals will argue they're simply recognizing excellence. But excellence in whose terms? A film that deeply speaks to the concerns of its immediate culture might alienate the international jury members who've seen similar stories from fifteen other countries that week. The safer bet for a jury is the film that's already been vetted by pre-selection committees, that has recognizable narrative strategies, that doesn't require too much cultural translation.
What gets lost is the regional cinema that sustains actual filmmaking cultures. The working director who makes three films for domestic audiences before attempting an international project. The producer who understands the specific economics of their own market. The cinematographer whose sensibility has been shaped by local light and landscape. These people often can't afford the festival circuit. They're making cinema for their own countries, not for juries.
This isn't a call to abolish festivals. They serve real functions. But we should be honest about what they're optimizing for: an international attention economy that benefits certain filmmakers at the expense of sustainable, rooted filmmaking cultures.
If festivals genuinely wanted to support international cinema, they might redirect resources toward regional funding mechanisms, domestic exhibition infrastructure in smaller countries, and prizes that come with money for future domestic projects rather than international distribution deals. They could reward films that deepen their own cinematic traditions rather than transcend them.
Until then, the standing ovations belong to the systems that created the incentives as much as they belong to the filmmakers who played by the rules.