Introduction: From Quality to Ideology

In 2012, film curator Roya Rastegar announced that film festivals had entered a state of “curatorial crisis” (p. 310). With the proliferation of digital technologies for making and exhibiting films, the terms used to justify festivals’ gatekeeping of an exponentially expanding film culture were beginning to look ever more unstable. In Rastegar's article, festivals’ claim to a monopoly on “quality” shows itself as underpinned by “ideologically charged notions of taste and aesthetics” and the exclusion of “cinematic sensibilities that flourish on the margins of film culture and wider society” (p. 310). While later chapters in this book grapple with several questions that Rastegar's polemic raises—questions of exclusion and difference, national identity and the framing of the Global South—I would like to pause on the implications of bringing together these two ideas: quality and ideology. Although ideology plays only a brief (if significant) role in Rastegar's piece and, as I discuss below, remains relatively un-theorised in film festival studies, the article represents something of a culmination of debates around the mobilisation of “quality” as a vague and sometimes obscurantist term used to secure the legitimacy of film festivals in global film culture.