As the global film festival circuit enters its busiest stretch, from Tokyo to Tallinn, a shared anxiety looms over red carpets and jury rooms alike: the vanishing space for independent cinema in traditional distribution networks.
From Tokyo International Film Festival’s (TIFF) Carlo Chatrian to Tallinn Black Nights’ Edvinas Puksta, festival curators and juries are echoing the same warning – without festivals, many powerful films might never find an audience at all.
At the Tokyo International Film Festival, jury president Carlo Chatrian, the former Berlinale and Locarno artistic director, voiced deep concern that most of the 15 competition titles this year lack distributors.
“There are so many strong, beautiful films,” he said, “but except for film festivals, there are very few chances for these films to be seen.” His remarks underscored the growing disconnect between creative output and commercial platforms — a rift widened by streaming dominance, market consolidation, and reduced theatrical opportunities for smaller films.
Chatrian, who now heads Italy’s National Museum of Cinema, stressed that the media’s role has become vital to the survival of independent filmmaking. “Your work is as important as ours,” he told journalists. “Festivals are big filters that bring a few remarkable works to attention amid massive audiovisual noise.”
In Tallinn, that same tension is shaping the Baltic Film Competition at the Black Nights Film Festival (POFF), where curator Edvinas Puksta’s lineup of 11 titles showcases the fragile yet resilient state of regional cinema.
The programme — heavy with Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian productions — features world premieres such as Ignas Jonynas’ ‘Borderline’ and Alise Zarina’s ‘Flesh, Blood, Even a Heart’. It opens with Sergei Loznitsa’s Cannes contender ‘Two Prosecutors’, a multinational co-production linking France, Germany, and the Baltics.
Puksta admitted that curating this year’s selection was shaped by both artistic and political urgency. He described Lithuania’s cultural instability — following protests over the appointment of a pro-Russian culture minister — as a backdrop to the festival’s programming choices.
One inclusion, ‘Hunger Strike Breakfast’ by Karolis Kaupinis, was chosen precisely because it “reflects what’s happening right now in the country.” For Puksta, festivals must remain more than showcases; they must act as guardians of free, diverse storytelling.
“Festivals have a mandate to inspire, engage and sometimes provoke,” he said, highlighting films such as ‘The Activist’, a gay neo-noir exploring extremism, and ‘New Money’, a satire on cryptocurrency. Both films, he noted, embody the cultural courage that streaming algorithms often overlook.
Meanwhile, the global calendar is crowded. From Vienna, São Paulo and Valladolid to Tokyo and Tallinn, hundreds of festivals this season are trying to rescue films from obscurity.
Yet Chatrian’s lament suggests that their very abundance also reflects desperation — a proliferation of platforms standing in for the shrinking space where art once met audiences.
As Vivian Qu, one of Tokyo’s jurors, put it succinctly, “Film festivals are probably the last sacred place for cinema viewing.” In a world where arthouse cinema is increasingly edged out by commercial priorities, that sacred space may soon become its last refuge.