A meditation on what film festivals actually do for cinema and why the answer is complicated.

The major film festivals — Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto — serve multiple functions that are in tension with each other. They are market events where distributors acquire rights. They are cultural events where prestige is assigned. They are premiere events where audiences see films before they have critical context. And they are, occasionally, discovery events where genuinely new cinema reaches international visibility for the first time.

The problem is that the market and prestige functions tend to overwhelm the discovery function over time. The films that get selected for the main competition are increasingly the films from established directors or major productions that distributors and studios have pre-positioned for the selection. The genuinely surprising entries tend to be in sidebars — Directors' Fortnight, Un Certain Regard — where they receive less attention.

The Cannes Palme d'Or has gone to films of varying quality and the relationship between the prize and the film's lasting reputation is loose. Apocalypse Now, The Tree of Life, and Parasite all won; so did several films that are now forgotten. What Cannes gives more reliably than quality judgment is platform: the ability to have your film discussed internationally in a way that no other mechanism replicates.