Given the outstanding cultural, social, historical and economic resonance of Italian film festivals, RIFF is expected to produce impact on several interwoven dimensions:
Scientific and Scholarly Impact
Through the creation, implementation and opening of the database, accessible here, RIFF will pivot a historiographical turn in Italian film historical research, stimulating scholarly attention on a key and yet overlooked phenomenon within the historical developments of Italian and international cinemas, cultures, histories and economies. Therefore, RIFF will:
1) develop the first, methodological framework that enables a global analysis and historical retracing of film festivals, greatly contributing to the progress of international film festival studies;
2) promote transdisciplinary research, prompting fruitful dialogues between film studies and gender studies, political sciences, international relations, destination management scholarship and economics of cultural organizations;
3) contribute to the development of innovative undergraduate- and master-level curricula, dedicated to the management of film festivals.
Socio-Cultural Impact
Aiming beyond the scientific and scholarly domain, the output of RIFF will be a catalogued and openly accessible database. As outlined above, numerous – material and digital – documents rom different excavation sites and exclusive audios will be collected and entered on the database. Further, festival professionals along with researchers external to the project will be invited to contribute to develop the database, by implementing documents and materials related to the histories of other Italian film festivals. This wide-ranging and growing collection is expected to guarantee long-term and increasing impact to RIFF, since it will not only ensure discoverability and preservation to historical sources and other ephemera, otherwise dispersed and thereby unavailable, but will also be opened for scholars as well as for general audience to populate it, study and reuse the collected materials. The added intent of opening up the database to the general audience (cinephiles, festival practitioners, film professionals, students, etc.) is part and parcel of our intent to contribute transversally to the UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To stimulate engagement within the public sphere, we envisage not only the international community of scholars as referential users of RIFF, but also citizens and other stakeholders who play a crucial role in both the revitalization and future sustainability of the cultural heritage.
Institutional Impact
The database will represent an important institutional asset to monitor the state of Italian film festivals and keep track of their developments. Indeed, regularly updated by scholars and managed by the project units, the database will provide important information – diachronically organized — about the administration, functioning, (public and private) funding, networking with (national, regional, local, industrial) stakeholders, and cultural policies of Italian film festivals. This level of impact gains crucial relevance in the face of European funding schemes, which have grown increasingly essential to the sustainability of film festivals. In this regard, the database both prompts and allows festival organizers to produce and preserve detailed accounts of their operations and cultural work, thus representing an innovative strategic tool for meeting the standards required by European funding applications.