NYT 14 Feb, “Filmmakers, film-industry types and the journalists who love them often refer to something called the festival circuit, a sequence of hectic, semi-glamorous events that crowd the calendar and circle the globe. But it might be more accurate to speak of a festival system: a complicated, ever-expanding web in which the interests of commerce, art and criticism converge, sometimes in harmony and sometimes at cross-purposes.
Any festival is contingent, ephemeral, something of a pseudo-event. When it is over, there is a brief flurry of evaluation — Toronto was strong this year, Sundance was disappointing, whatever — but those judgments tend to fade as the movies themselves, the ostensible point of the whole enterprise, make their way in the world, or into oblivion, or onto the next festival.” Cont’d reading NYT
