Film Festivals and Sustainability Communication: The Contribution of Web and Social Media Analysis

The challenge of sustainability and “greenness” requires adopting a holistic perspective—one ca pable of interpreting phenomena and guiding processes from environmental, economic, and social points of view. al aspects of the events, which, while import ant, overlook a complementary dimension: the meaning behind sustainability-related commu nication practices. In this context, culture—as a resource of iden tity, a tool for negotiation, and a vehicle for di plomacy—represents a fundamental instrument to be employed. At the same time, achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda can serve as a key driv er of growth for cultural and creative enterpris es, particularly those in the film sector. When referring to film enterprises here, we are mainly speaking about film festivals—enti ties that present specific challenges of analy sis, starting with the lack of a universally ac cepted definition of what constitutes a festival. Furthermore, given that film festival research is a relatively new field (emerging in the early 1990s), the literature remains fragmented and incomplete, with various subfields but little co hesion. The intersection of two crucial areas for this study—film festivals and environmental sustainability—is particularly underexplored. Discussions about greenness in the context of festivals are often limited to organization 1 For these reasons, the festival as an object of study is of particular interest in this work. It seeks to answer the following questions: What is the current state of the film industry in terms of sustainability? How are actors, spaces, narratives, values, and technologies related to environmental sustainability reflected in Euro pean film festivals? In what ways do festivals, as formal and informal spaces of exchange, con tribute to the creation of transcultural commu nities characterised by existing and future sus tainability practices? Moreover, how can web and social media analysis contribute to digitally integrating reflections on the interconnected ness between film festivals and sustainability (not only environmental)? Given this complex research question, the project proposes three general objectives: first, to examine the current state of the film industry in terms of sustainability and sustainability com munication management; secondly, to develop monitoring and evaluation tools aimed at, on one hand, assessing the effectiveness of communica tion actions by film enterprises; and on the other, improving them by establishing self-assessment tools that promote full awareness of the sustain ability culture; in the end, to contribute to the de velopment of a new generation of professionals and audiences in the film industry who are fully aware of “green” issues. The methodological framework adopted will be a multi-phase process based on the analysis of the communication strategies of festivals, a subsequent socio-ethnographic investigation of selected case studies, and web and social media research. Initially, the project involved a systematization of Italian and English literature, focusing on ac ademic articles, scientific texts, and key reports in this field, drawn from the following databases: Web of Science; JSTOR; ProQuest Arts & Human ities; Scopus, FIAF; Sage; Opac Unicatt; World Cat Utrecht University. A wide range of results emerged, leading to a selection process that nar rowed the material down to 165 contributions, forming two literature review frameworks fo cused on the project’s two major themes. Follow ing the selection of primary sources, a mapping of the current state of film festivals in Italy and across Europe was conducted, with particular reference to the Netherlands—a country of in terest due to its known challenges in connecting local cinema with the concept of environmental sustainability. The creation of a festival database—proposed here for the first time—aimed to reconstruct the network of currently active film festivals in the two countries, based on criteria such as geo graphic location, event mission, characteristic film genre, and the size of the festival. A total of 80 film festivals were mapped in the Nether lands, still active as of 2025, compared to 172 in Italy during the monitoring period of 2023–2025. From this broad corpus, two semantic maps were created to identify a sub-sample of Europe an festivals to focus on, working along two direc tions: on the one hand, explicitly green-themed festivals (e.g., CinemAmbiente in Turin) were deliberately excluded; on the other, attention was placed on a smaller group of festivals (45 in Italy, 20 in the Netherlands) whose missions referenced sustainable festival policies, with par ticular emphasis on small-to-medium-sized festi vals—those in continuous growth. Based on the well-known distinction between “business-oriented” and “audience-oriented” fes tivals (Peranson 2008), the project focused on the latter—festivals geared toward their audienc es and thus generally developing—rather than A-list festivals (e.g., the Venice Biennale), which are business-focused and already well estab lished globally. This selection process ultimately led to the iden tification of two case studies most aligned with the research question: the Lago Film Fest (Revine Lago, Treviso, Italy) and the Leiden Internation al Film Festival (Leiden, South Holland, Nether lands), both promoters of independent cinema. In addition to the literature review and case study analysis, it was deemed appropriate to integrate a research methodology centred on social listening (Galli 2018)—a valuable tool for marketing professionals and research institutes to understand online discourse around specific topics and to formulate strategic actions. In this study, the methodology was provided by Blogmeter, a Milan-based research institute and project partner. Its Social Suite platform includes several components designed to listen to online discussions through sentiment analysis and to assess the influence of influencers and opinion leaders across sectors. This tool enabled a deep er exploration of digital discourse surrounding the European cinematic landscape. More spe cifically, it allowed for the collection of public opinions regarding the two case studies, with the ultimate goal of enriching the understanding of the relationship between film festivals and sus tainability communication—complementing data already gathered through qualitative investiga tions (structured interviews and life stories) con ducted on-site at the two festivals in 2024. Space, discourse, practice: these are the key words used to explore the dimension of film events, viewing the festival event as a network of social discourses, spaces, actors, practices, and rituals related to environmental sustainability. Based on these considerations, the research aimed to reconstruct a new kind of ecological practice, offering an alternative perspective to the typical managerial focus of festivals on en vironmental matters (such as recycling, green transportation, energy saving, etc.). Instead, it seeks to highlight a deeper level: the meaning of ecological practice for festival audiences, as in terpreted through the communication strategies employed by the management teams of Europe an film festivals.