Film Festivals as Stabilising Devices: Professional Relations and Career Maintenance among Distributors and Exhibitors

Film festivals are often analysed as sites of artistic consecration, market exchange, or audience formation. This article proposes a different perspective by examining them as devices of stabilisation within the professional world of film distribution and cinema exhibition. Focusing on professionals located downstream in the film value chain, it shows that festivals do not suspend the ordinary constraints of professional activity. Rather, they concentrate and reconfigure them within bounded temporal and spatial settings. Drawing on ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews conducted at the Cannes Film Festival and the Les Arcs European Film Festival, the article analyses three mechanisms through which festivals contribute to stabilisation. First, they create collective situations in which judgements about films and professional partners are calibrated, compared, and circulated. Second, they provide face-to-face settings in which strained ties can be adjusted and made workable again without resolving underlying conflicts. Third, they support continued participation in professional networks and thus contribute to the maintenance of trajectories under unequal conditions. The article argues that stabilisation should not be understood as harmony or consensus, but as the ongoing relational work through which interaction is kept possible over time in a context of uncertainty, asymmetry, and recurrent disagreement. By foregrounding these mechanisms, it contributes to cultural sociology by showing how professional worlds endure through ordinary relational infrastructures.