"Words Matter": Film Festivals and Territorial Conflicts

This article presents a brief chronological overview of European film festival propaganda approaches in the context of the territorial conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first century, which either took place in or affected the European continent, the birthplace of this particular type of cultural event. The text focuses on the Yugoslav space and the Trieste Crisis (1945–1954), a Cold War dispute between Italy and Yugoslavia regarding the northern Adriatic borderlands. The Trieste Crisis, which coincided with the early wave of film festival creation, exposes some of the basic methods of legitimising ideological and territorial demands through festivals, demonstrating how such events can question the political reality in which they take place while at the same time adapting to it.