Venice started film festivals in 1932; the Big Five still rule
Once a year, whole cities become screening rooms. Festivals can be competitive launchpads or quiet showcases, outdoor or online, short-film or horror-only. Venice is the oldest still running; with Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Sundance it forms the so-called Big Five that the industry treats as prestige weather.
A film festival is an organized stretch of screenings in one city or region, usually annual, sometimes outdoors or on the web. Programmers invite titles or pick from submissions by filmmakers, producers, sales agents and distributors. Audiences often see premieres months before a wider release. Focus can be format, runtime, genre, who made the film, where it came from, or subject matter. Competitive and non-competitive events both matter as industry launchpads for new voices and as boosters for studio work already on the calendar.
Prestige talk still centers on the Big Five, ordered by founding date: Venice, Cannes, Berlin (the original Big Three), then Toronto and Sundance. Other heavy hitters include Karlovy Vary, Locarno, San Sebastián, SXSW, Telluride, Tribeca and Edinburgh. Venice opened in 1932 and remains the oldest festival still operating. Edinburgh International Film Festival is Britain’s longest-running and the longest continually running festival worldwide.
Melbourne (1952) and Sydney (1954) lead Australia’s calendar. Yorkton (1947) is North America’s first and longest-running short-film festival. Columbus’s Chris Awards, begun in 1953, claim the longest continuous United States run for documentary, educational and sponsored work. A 1948 Cleveland festival was among the first American events to honor industrial and training films.
Even posters become collectibles: Larry Rivers designed a 1963 First New York Film Festival lithograph with pastel additions, and Piet Zwart’s 1928 ITF poster shows how graphic modernism sold international cinema decades earlier.
Source: Film festival
