In “Penser les festivals de films. Approches universitaires, institutionnelles et professionnelles: regards croisés”, Nice, 7-8 october 2024.

Founded in 1999 as an offshoot of the film club “Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche” in Udine, Northeast Italy, the Far East Film Festival (FEFF) has since grown to become one of the world’s foremost film festivals dealing with East and South East Asian cinema. Over more than 25 years of operation, FEFF has served as a forerunner for other similar events, and has contributed in a fundamental way to the promotion of Asian cinema in Italy by introducing little-known directors, hosting retrospectives, publishing catalogues and monographs, acting annually as a learning and meeting point for more than a generation of cinephiles, critics, and scholars.

The presentation builds on an ongoing research in the FEFF Archive and among the people associated with it. This research, part of the national research project “RIFF – Reframing Italian film festivals. Histories, politics, cultures”, aims to examine the role of Udine’s FEFF as a place of transit, transformation, and creation of film culture and to valorise the stories – both in written and oral form – of those who work and attend it. The research on the FEFF, whose methodological premises will be the main topic of the presentation, is intended as the first part of an exploration of the galaxy of Italian thematic festivals and retrospectives dedicated to East Asian cinema that arose in the country before and especially after 1999. This research is concerned with the history of the FEFF, the premises of its foundation, the reasons for its success and its effect on Italian film culture, and seeks to account for its impact on the cinephile and critical communities.

Thus, the presentation will discuss how to approach the study of a thematic festival such as the FEFF in its different dimensions: as a nodal point where certain cinephile and critical trends are developed and boosted, as a place of cultural legitimation for specific genres or “peripheral” cinemas, and as an institutional space capable of bringing different film cultures into dialogue. Several methodological issues will be reflected upon: how to go beyond the curtain that is created in the self-narration processes, especially by testimonies with institutional and public roles; how to orchestrate the different histories of the community that creates and experiences such a festival; how to deal with the research into a festival archive that is still in the making and in use; how to interrelate and use for the research the various materials gathered, such as working documents, programmes, drafts, press reviews and other writings intended for private and public purposes. Drawing on the FEFF case study, the talk aims to present a hybrid approach to the research of specialised film festivals that integrates archival work on heterogeneous materials with oral history research carried out through interviews with key testimonies. Archival documents help to confirm or question oral sources, and vice versa, proving to be a fruitful method for reconstructing the history, impact, internal dynamics, memory, and communities of and around a film festival.