The Marché du Film, in Theory

The first thing you need to understand about a film market is that it is not what it looks like from the outside. From the outside, from the photographs, from the coverage, from the general cultural mythology that has built up around places like Cannes — it looks like glamour. Red carpets. Celebrities. The particular performance of importance has been elevated to an art form of its own by the film industry. That is the surface, and the surface is real enough, but it is not what the market is.

The market is a trade floor. I say this not to demystify it or to be cynical about it, but because recognizing it for what it is actually makes it more interesting, not less. Buyers and sellers. Catalogs and screening schedules. Rights packages and territorial exclusions, and the particular negotiating dance that happens when someone has something the other person wants and both of them know it, and neither of them wants to show it first. I have spent a long time in rooms that operate on exactly this logic. The currency is different. The underlying grammar is the same.

What draws me to the world of film markets — and I have been spending more time learning this world than I would have predicted even two years ago — is the specific question of who gets to be in the room. A trade negotiation at the WTO has formal accreditation processes, observer status categories, and rules about which delegations can attend which sessions. A film market has its own version of all of this, and the effect is similar: the people who most need access to the infrastructure are often the ones for whom access is most expensive and most complicated to arrange.

A filmmaker from Burkina Faso attending FESPACO is at a festival built, in part, for filmmakers like her. The ecosystem there has a different center of gravity. But FESPACO is biennial (next one is February 2027), and the window it opens is short, and the buyers who have relationships with the platforms that could actually change the distribution picture for her film may or may not be in the room. They are more likely to be in Cannes, where the badge required to access the Marché du Film costs more than many independent filmmakers spend on post-production.

I am not describing a conspiracy. I want to be pellucid — as one of my former Prime Ministers likes to say — about this, because the instinct when describing structural exclusion is to reach for villains, and the film market doesn't really have villains. It has incentives. The buyers are in Cannes because that is where the other buyers are, and where the sellers with the largest catalogues and the most reliable delivery infrastructure have always gone. The system reproduces itself not because anyone decided to exclude the filmmaker from Burkina Faso but because no one decided, specifically and deliberately, to include her.

There is a version of the film festival ecosystem that works differently. FESPACO works differently. The Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami works differently — it was built explicitly around Caribbean cinema and the Caribbean diaspora, and what it has managed to create in a relatively short time is a room where the center of gravity has genuinely shifted. I find these spaces more interesting than the famous ones, not because I am against the famous ones, but because the famous ones are already well-documented, and the interesting problem is elsewhere.

The interesting problem is always the infrastructure. How films get from the people who make them to the people who need to see them. How that pathway gets built, who builds it, and what it costs to walk it. I spent thirty years watching this problem play out in trade. I am finding, with some surprise and considerable recognition, that it plays out in almost exactly the same way in film.

The grammar, as I said, is the same.