[Filmfestivalresearch] Query on festival programme announcement vs. ticket sales

[Dina Iordanova]

Dear friends and colleagues,

I hope you will be able to help us research an aspect of film festival operation that is on my mind a lot these days.
I need to find out more about the way in which the programme of forthcoming festivals is publicised to the local community, especially in instances where the festival relies on ticket sales for a significant part of its financial activity.

In particular, festivals which are of direct relevance to the context of my interest, include:

BFI London Film Festival
Viennale
Gothenburg
Munich
Paris (the one in July)
Thessaloniki
Karlovy Vary
San Sebastian
Hong Kong IFF
Sydney/Melbourne
Chicago
Montreal
Zanzibar

If you could tell us more specifically about these, it would be great. But I am interested to hear about these matters in principle as well as in relation to other festivals.

Here are my specific questions:

• How long in advance, in relation to the festival dates, is the full programme revealed?
• How long in advance do tickets for the screenings go on sale?
• What media outlets are used to publicise the programme and bring it to the attention of local audiences so as to ensure they buy tickets?
• As some distributors want to keep secrecy about  forthcoming premieres (usually supplying big ticket items for the opening or closing nights, or for special screenings of the crowd-pleasing type), does one delay the announcement of the programme until these big players are fine with going public, or one makes a partial programme announcement and additional 'surprise' special announcements later on?
•   If you know what is the percentage of revenues coming from ticket sales, this would be extremely helpful to know as well.

May I please ask you to respond both to me and Stefanie Van de Peer (sevdp at st-andrews.ac.uk)? Stefanie is copied here and will assist me in creating a compilation from the responses we receive. We will, of course, share the result with the list members.

Looking forward to hearing from you, and thank you so much in advance. Dina

Prof. Dina Iordanova FRSA
Chair in Film Studies
Director, Centre for Film Studies
Publisher, St. Andrews Film Studies
University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK