“Form is when the substance rises to the surface”

This paper focuses on how film festivals research can be epistemologically framed and methodologically designed. ‘How can a film festival be observed?’ and ‘how can a fes­ tival secure its own survival and preserve itself over the time?’ are here the necessaries starting questions, for it urges one to look at how and where a festival is formed, in the moment when it takes shape. Drawing from the long story of Festival dei Popoli – Inter­ national Documentary Film Festival, this paper aims to demonstrate that it is possible to identify three distinct objects of analysis: practices, narratives and autopoiesis, cor­ responding to three different but complementary ways of observing festivals (as inter­ actions, narrations and organizations). This theoretical and methodological framework, inspired by systems theory, narratives and interaction analysis, can permit an uncom­ mon observational perspective that is able to question what is often taken for granted.