To live through a film festival is to live through an intensive emotive experience of film viewings, encounters with friends and strangers, travel, displacement and the exploration of new spaces – both real and imaginary. It is the disorientating experience of this modern-day carnivalesque which marks a time out of time of a film festival when the norms of the everyday cinema-based or home-based film viewing experience are suspended, challenged or upended. Although some aspects of the film festival experience have changed over a long history of film festival cultures there are others that remain constant: an effort emotional and physical to attend a festival, excitement or festival buzz of being part of a festival, a sense of community of viewers rooted in the individual response to films, and the impact of seeing a film in the festival environment which ranges from pleasurable and inspiration through boring to outrages and abject.

Dorota Ostrowska's book explores the uniqueness of this occasionally irreverent, often disruptive and at times unsettling festival experience for the diverse festival audiences through the concept of festive chronotopes. It argues the importance of space for our understanding of festival experience as it is this space, intimate and collective, that shapes film festival programmes, moulds curational and programming practice and critical response, and drives the desire for the festive experience to be repeated and reinvented on annual basis.

The book explores the idea of festive chronotopes in relation to a myriad of European film festivals, international, human rights, documentary and migrant, each of which is seen as a manifestation of a particular festive chronotope: imaginary, utopic, crisis, migrant and indigenous. Each of the chronotopes is presented as an expression of a different set of spatial relationships that bound the place, audiences and films of a film festival together.