Film festivals as a public relations activity: With the example of Malatya International Film Festival

Film festivals are not an activity where people are merely passive spectators at the cinema. Special screenings, seminars and interviews, categorized competitions, social responsibility projects and workshops, and many other activities within the film festival show how comprehensive this communication environment is. This study, which approaches the relationship between public relations and cinema from the framework of film festivals, focusing on the relationship between communication studies and many other fields, focuses on the process of a festival organized in Malatya between 2010 and 2021, which is called MUFF (Malatya International Film Festival). Based on the argument that film festivals can also be a public relations activity, the study aims to reveal and analyze how public relations activities are organized in the scope, method and impact areas of film festivals in general and MUFF in particular. In this study, which is based on a descriptive analysis as a qualitative research method, it has been observed that the public relations activities used in the execution of film festivals have a hierarchy within themselves, and certain categories stand out in order to understand this hierarchy. The visual, audio, textual contents and both visual and audio activities carried out before, during and after the festival at MUFF were described, and the facts that stand out in MUFF as a public relations activity were determined with the data obtained. The importance of the public relations activities carried out in this film festival has been revealed and the strengths and weaknesses of the festival have been analyzed comparatively.