Four Festival Leaders Gather at Cannes—and Offer a Surprising Counterargument to the Industry's Doom Narrative
TL;DR: The heads of Sundance, Berlin, Telluride, and NYFF met at Cannes to discuss the film festival circuit's future. Attendance is actually climbing. Younger audiences are showing up. The real problem isn't interest—it's that the venues and infrastructure can't keep pace with demand.
The question Eugene Hernandez faced at the American Pavilion in Cannes seemed almost ridiculous: Why do film festivals still matter?
It's ridiculous because he was sitting in the most commercially saturated film festival on earth, surrounded by yacht parties, streaming megadeals, and the perpetual machinery of awards campaigning. And yet the question was real, and urgent, and Hernandez (Sundance's director, and someone who's spent his career bridging the gap between indie film culture and the press that covers it) was exactly the right person to answer it.
On May 20, 2026, Hernandez joined Berlin's Tricia Tuttle, Telluride's Julie Huntsinger, and Daniel Battsek (who oversees the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center) for a panel at the American Pavilion. Moderated by IndieWire's Anne Thompson, the conversation didn't unfold like a crisis intervention. It sounded more like a diagnosis, one that contradicted much of what the industry has been saying about itself.
The Attendance Numbers That Flip the Narrative
Here's what stopped me: Tuttle reported that Berlin had seen 7.5% attendance growth over the past two years. That's not a rounding error. For a festival the size of the Berlinale—which drew roughly 300,000 accredited attendees in its most recent edition—tens of thousands of additional bodies in theaters is meaningful movement in the right direction.
Battsek added a qualitative observation that carries equal weight: younger audiences are coming to the New York Film Festival at rates he hasn't seen in a decade. "Younger audiences are more aware of cinema than they've been in the past ten years," he said. Not thriving. Not booming. But aware. Engaged. Showing up.
What's striking is how this defies the prevailing conversation in the trades. The discourse around film festivals has tilted so heavily toward doom that actual growth numbers get drowned out by the narrative. Streaming killed everything, nobody watches movies anymore, the circuit is collapsing. Except the people who actually run these festivals showed up at Cannes with data that says the opposite. The real parallel here isn't to some imagined golden age of arthouse cinema but to the mid-1990s indie boom, when Sundance and Cannes functioned as launchpads for filmmakers like Soderbergh and Tarantino, and audiences treated festival selections as genuine cultural events rather than prestige-market product. We may be closer to that energy than the doom chorus acknowledges.
Movie OTT tracks which festival premieres actually gain traction on streaming platforms afterward, and the pattern is revealing: films that build word-of-mouth through physical festival runs first consistently outperform those that skip that step entirely. The algorithm, it turns out, amplifies what human curation has already validated. That's not nothing.
Why Each Festival Occupies a Different Niche (and Why That Matters)
These aren't interchangeable institutions. Each one operates in a distinct lane, and understanding that distinction is key to reading the health of the circuit as a whole:
Sundance (January, Park City) is the discovery engine, where acquisition deals close at 2 a.m. and careers get launched. Hernandez inherited a festival that's still recalibrating after its deliberations around staying put or relocating.
Berlin (February) is the political festival. Social urgency, international co-production credentials, European footing. Tuttle has pushed the public-facing programming harder than her predecessors, which may explain part of that attendance bump.
Telluride (August/September, Colorado) is the prestige whisperer. Small town, outsized influence. Oscar campaigns have been quietly built from this mountain festival for decades. Consider that Nomadland screened at Telluride in 2020 (virtually, during the pandemic pivot) before sweeping through Venice and Toronto on its way to Best Picture. That trajectory wasn't accidental. It was the relay in action.
NYFF (September/October, New York) carries the weight of Lincoln Center, the critical institution that the press corps and awards community still defer to, even if that deference is harder to measure than box office or streaming numbers.
Together, they form a relay race across nine months. A film premieres at Sundance in January, maybe gets picked up at Berlin or NYFF for international prestige, and then enters the awards conversation by fall. That pipeline doesn't exist by accident. It's structural. And it's working better than the outside conversation suggests.
Battsek's Point About Why Curation Has Become Genuinely Scarce
"It's one of those topics that's constantly discussed. It's always been difficult, but never impossible," Battsek told the Cannes audience. "I feel that film festivals right now have reached a priority level. People really look to festivals because they curate films and audiences."
That word—curate—is doing real work in 2026. When every streaming platform offers thousands of titles optimized for engagement rather than quality, when the algorithm is designed to keep you watching rather than point you toward the best thing, the human act of saying "this film is worth your time" becomes genuinely scarce. Battsek's argument is that festivals have inadvertently become more valuable precisely because the alternative has proven so unsatisfying for serious film viewers.
Most coverage of this panel has framed it as festival leaders defending their own relevance, which is the least interesting read. The sharper observation is that these four institutions now function as the last credible editorial layer between a finished film and a viewer's attention, performing a role that critics and publications used to share but have largely ceded to algorithmic recommendation engines. That's not self-preservation. That's a market failure they didn't create but are now forced to fill.
It's similar to what happened in music: algorithmic playlists paradoxically increased appetite for live performance and DJ-selected nights. The less trustworthy the automation, the more people seek out human judgment. Festivals are the film world's equivalent of a trusted DJ, and people are willing to show up for that.
Tricia Tuttle's Infrastructure Argument Is the Honest Part
Tuttle went further than optimism, though. She pointed at the real problem: "We're failing audiences because we have an infrastructure problem, not a desire problem."
This is the argument the industry usually avoids. It's easier to blame streaming, or social media, or collapsing attention spans, than to admit that the physical infrastructure for watching films has been chronically underfunded and actively dismantled over fifteen years in many markets.
The desire is there. Berlin's attendance growth proves it. Packed houses at Telluride every September prove it. What's missing is capacity. Not enough screens. Not enough venues. Not enough programmers in enough cities to bring these films to audiences who'd watch them if given the chance.
That's a structural problem, not a cultural one. And it requires structural solutions. Investment. Policy support. Institutional commitment. Not better marketing.
Movie OTT's where-to-watch tracker reflects this gap in concrete terms: festival premieres often have significant delays before reaching streaming platforms in secondary markets, not because there's no interest, but because distribution infrastructure doesn't exist to serve those audiences at scale. A film wins at Berlin in February and doesn't appear on any platform in Southeast Asia until August. That's not algorithm. That's logistics.
What This Means for Audiences Outside the Festival Circuit Bubble
For viewers in India, this conversation carries a specific weight that rarely surfaces in Western festival coverage.
India produces roughly 1,800-2,000 certified films annually, more than any other country. Yet Indian-language films remain structurally underrepresented at Sundance, Berlin, Telluride, and NYFF. The infrastructure problem Tuttle described looks different from Mumbai or Bangalore or Kolkata.
The OTT platforms that dominate Indian viewing—Netflix India, Amazon Prime Video India, Disney+ Hotstar, JioCinema, and others—have become the primary discovery mechanism for international festival films in the market. A film premieres at Sundance in January and might reach Indian viewers via Netflix or Prime Video six months later. Maybe. If it gets picked up at all.
For Indian cinephiles who follow the festival circuit closely (and there are more than Western industry figures assume), Movie OTT tracks current availability across all major Indian platforms. A Berlinale winner surfaces on an unexpected service six months after its European premiere, and suddenly the whole distribution puzzle becomes visible.
Battsek's point about younger audiences rediscovering cinema through festivals applies here too. India's multiplex boom created a generation of urban viewers increasingly sophisticated about international cinema, hungry for curatorial guidance that algorithms don't provide. The festival circuit hasn't figured out how to reach them at scale. That's not a desire problem. That's infrastructure.
So What Actually Happens Next?
The panel was diagnosis, not prescription. What comes after the conversation at Cannes is the harder question: do these four directors go home and actually coordinate, or does each institution continue operating in its own silo while collectively lamenting the state of independent film?
The more interesting development to watch isn't the next Sundance lineup announcement or the next Berlin Golden Bear winner. It's whether festivals begin formalizing relationships with repertory cinemas, essentially building year-round infrastructure for the audiences who show up in August for Telluride and then have nowhere to go in November.
Hard to say if that kind of coordination is politically feasible given how fiercely these institutions guard their individual identities. But based on everything said at the American Pavilion, the appetite for it is there.
The circuit isn't dying. It's straining under a weight of unmet demand that its current infrastructure can't support. A very different problem. And arguably a much more solvable one.
For the latest on how festival premieres translate into streaming availability across regions and platforms, Movie OTT tracks these patterns as deals close and libraries update in real time.
