Precarity, Innovation, and Survival in the Indian Film Festival Sector

Abstract

Despite the vast expansion in the film festival sector in India since the early 2000s, most festivals have remained financially precarious. This is true of more mainstream festivals with industry support as well as of myriad activist and “alternative” festivals on the margins. In addition, the country’s Hindu nationalist government has subjected all cultural spaces to increased scrutiny and policing. As the virus affected India and the Indian government enforced a national lockdown, festival organizers had to adapt rapidly. In order to survive, they looked both to global strategies and specific local histories of exhibition and circulation. In this chapter, I map the festival sector in India in the midst of crisis and explore the divergent strategies for survival adopted by festival organizers. I focus closely on the “frontline” strategies implemented by two community-based, activist film festivals that have adopted distinct, yet successful, models for navigating the pandemic. Already adept at negotiating multiple forms of precarity, they connected with new global audiences while redefining ideals of “community.” This chapter explores what these festival experiments tell us about how the festival as medium might change politically, economically, and cinematically, even beyond the pandemic.