“Horror in Defence of the Planet!”: Sustainability and Fan Cultures at the European Genre Film Festival

In a 2022 roundtable discussion about “greening” film festivals, scholar Marikje de Valck noted that “there is a certain logic at work at film festivals that uses a model of abundance. It is always about too many films that you can’t actually watch and it is also about inviting many, many guests.” de Valck sees this tendency towards abundance as a result of the pressures applied by neoliberal government systems on cultural organisations to articulate their success via metrics of growth, whereby in order to secure essential funding festivals must continually deliver on program expansion and attracting larger audiences. Concurrently, film festivals around the world are also striving to reduce their carbon footprint and make meaningful contributions sustainable futures. Many contemporary film festivals operate in a space of tension between a values-driven commitment to social and environmental sustainability and a dependency on growth. Within this context, initiatives developed by the largest film festivals constitute the most visible sustainability interventions in the industry. The 2022 announcement of the “Locarno International Film Festival” Green Project (incorporating a new prize for best ecological film and the Green Film Fund) received media coverage around world and reiterated Locarno’s status as a global leader in this space. Lurking in the shadows of these glamourous and highly publicised events, however, are hundreds of lesser-known genre film festivals which serve diverse taste cultures and are held annually across the globe. What role might such these festivals, which often operate with minimal resourcing for impact assessment and strategy development, have to play in environmental sustainability?