Cinando film festival programming dataset

This data set supports the analyses presented in the paper titled Quantifying the global film festival circuit: Networks, diversity, and public value creation, published in PLoS ONE: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297404. The R code to reproduce the analyses is available at: https://github.com/andreskarjus/cinandofestivals. The data sample is sufficient for the reproduction of results and graphs. The graphs in this paper are also available as an interactive dashboard in an online supplementary, where details behind individual data points can be easily observed: https://andreskarjus.github.io/cinandofestivals.

This research has been made possible by data provided directly to authors from the Cannes Film Market (Marché du Film – Festival de Cannes), the company operating the Cinando website and database (https://cinando.com/). Launched in 2003 as the database of the attendees at the Cannes Festival, Cinando has since grown into the premier platform supporting hundreds of film festivals and film markets (industry events held during festivals, mostly oriented to promoting investment opportunities, rights sales, and production services). Cinando offers film professionals tools to navigate the film industry, including information about contacts, films, projects in development, market screening schedules, market attendees, and screeners. The platform services film festivals and markets by facilitating rights sales, investments, and business-to-business video on demand. The platform relies on a large proprietary relational database. The authors received a full database dump via a research partnership with the data owner on 2021-10-08.

This data set concerns the part of the Cinando database that registers information about film festival programming and contains, at face value, 77,398 films programmed at 38,367 festival events, resulting in 183,865 film–festival event pairs, between 2007–2022 (festivals_films.csv). The festival metadata includes event and, occasionally, festival series title, event location country, and event year. Film metadata contains runtime, production year, names of crew members (filmrole.csv - only crew role and gender are made available to protect privacy), origin countries (filmcountry.csv), languages spoken in the film (filmlang.csv), and content type tags (filmgen.csv). The latter is a mixture of tags typically used to describe films within the festival context, including genre (e.g. drama, documentary), target audience (children’s, family), identity (Jewish, LGBT), and production type (TV Series, VR). The authors have cleaned and homogenized the data to make it usable and expanded it with festival type and crew gender information. Cinando technical IDs and personal data have been anonymized. The data owner supports the publication of this data set.