Study on Film Festivals is an initiative that examines the film festival landscape, its individual protagonists, as well as its current functions and effects.

The initiative was launched by Tanja C. Krainhöfer and is academically and contextually supported by a group of academics from various disciplines (media economics, communication science and computer science, etc.). In addition to collaborators, the following people are at the heart of the initiative:

Tanja C. Krainhöfer

Studied production and media science at the HFF (University of Film and Television Munich). After various activities in the strategic development of companies and non-profit organisations in the film and cultural sectors, she turned to market-oriented, empirical research in 2011. Today, Tanja’s focus lies on explorative and descriptive research, specialising in film festivals. This includes the analysis of factors of success (as part of her doctorate thesis at the KU Eichstätt), quantitative market and competition analysis, as well as diversity studies of individual as well as co-operative film festivals.

Dr. Tobias Petri

Graduated in Bioinformatics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany, having completed his doctoral thesis on the analysis of complex networks. Tobias has published studies on the inference, simulation and similarity of networks and is conversant with both large and small-scale statistical analysis, as well as scientific visualisation. Tobias is a music enthusiast and film scores and soundtracks are his long-time passion.

Konrad Schreiber

Is a bioinformatics specialist with degrees from the LMU and TU in Munich. Parallel to his scientific activities at the Institute for Informatics at the LMU, Munich, he assumed his role of IT consultant. His expertise lies in software development, project management and methodology in the area of data analysis and statistics. This focus led him to quantitative market and competitive analyses in the areas of culture and media.

Dr. Thomas Wiedemann

Studied communication and political science, French, and Spanish philology and, since 2010, has been a research associate at the Department of Communication Studies and Media Research at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. There he is currently heading the project “Making of”, which focuses on Germany’s feature film production and is sponsored by the German Research Foundation.


Dr. rer. pol. Morticia Zschiesche

Studied theatre/film/television studies and journalism at the FU Berlin and received her doctorate in sociology at the Ruprecht-Karls-University of Heidelberg. She is author, curator and advises organisations on cultural funding, financing and evaluation. Morticia was part of the ministry team that developed the film concept of the German state of Baden-Württemberg for its Ministry of Science, Research and Art, and today supports municipalities with alternative cinema concepts and the development of a cinema strategy.