Inside the Festival Ecosystem: Annina Wettstein in conversation with Alice Butler

At this year’s Dublin International Film Festival, an unglamorous truth about the film circuit surfaced early: most films don’t fail because they aren’t good enough, they fail because they don’t fit.

Hosted by aemi and moderated by co-director Alice Butler, the conversation with programmer Annina Wettstein peeled back the mythology of festival selection, revealing a process that is as strategic as it is subjective.

Zurich-based Annina Wettstein has built a career that moves fluidly across the European festival landscape; as a programmer, curator and consultant on festival strategy and world sales. Currently part of the selection committee at Dok Leipzig, her trajectory into cinema feels less like a career shift than a natural drift: from studying social anthropology and working in academia to following a long-standing passion for film. Starting in distribution before joining the Solothurn Film Festival, where she spent nearly a decade shaping programmes, her path unfolded organically through sustained collaboration and an international network that continues to define her work today.

Focusing on Dok Leipzig, Wettstein described a system overwhelmed by volume: more than 3,000 submissions each year, with around 2,000 competing for just eight slots for features and shorts each in the International Competition. “It’s not about choosing the best films,” she suggested, but about constructing a programme: something shaped by tone, balance and identity as much as by quality.

Despite carefully defined criteria, the process remains irreducibly human. Some films are selected unanimously within minutes; others linger, debated at length. Counterintuitively, those that divide opinion may have a strong presence. A film that sparks discussion, Wettstein noted, has already done something right—even if it ultimately gets rejected.

That emphasis on context extends to the structure of festivals themselves. Each edition is built around a curatorial vision, but also around a specific audience—one that remains local, even within international industry events. Diversity of form, geography and perspective is not incidental but essential, and different sections of a festival operate with entirely different logics. A competition lineup, for instance, carries a different weight and intention than an audience award strand.

If selection is an art, then strategy is its shadow discipline. Alongside her programming work, Wettstein consults on festival trajectories, advising filmmakers and producers on how to navigate an increasingly complex ecosystem. Timing, premiere status and platform choice can determine not just where a film screens, but whether it travels at all.

A case study presented by Wettstein is that of Journey of Shadows by visual artist Yves Netzhammer. An award-winning animated feature whose international path was shaped through careful positioning. Although Dok Lipzig focuses on documentary and animation, Journey of Shadows was a best fit for an experimental festival such as the Rotterdam Film Festival, and after its premiere in Tiger Competition and many other festivlas, the best way for the film to find its audience was through art exhibitions instead of a theatrical release. Rather than relying on a single high-profile launch, the film’s circulation reflects a broader truth: visibility is built over time, across contexts.

For emerging filmmakers, the practicalities can be daunting, as the audience’s questions to Wettstein showed. Platforms like FilmFreeway, doubts around premiere status, and even the choice between submitting a rough cut or a final version all feed into an opaque decision-making process. And yet, as Wettstein made clear, obscurity is often more damaging than rejection. A film that passes unnoticed is far worse off than one that provokes disagreement.

This matters all the more as festivals take on a growing role within the industry. With cinema attendance under pressure, they have become key sites of distribution and visibility, particularly for films that exist outside the mainstream. But Wettstein is wary of the industry’s fixation on A-list festivals. The vast majority of events worldwide, she pointed out, do not require premiere status, and smaller festivals can offer more meaningful engagement.

What emerges is a quiet reframing of success. Festivals are not simply gatekeepers, but ecosystems: spaces where films encounter audiences, circulate, and accumulate meaning. In that sense, the real question is not how to get in, but where a film can resonate.

And sometimes, that begins not with selection, but with a conversation.