MSMN Analysis
Explainer based on published Screen Ireland market notes and festival-market materials — not a red-carpet diary and not an exclusive interview package.

Locarno, Berlin and Cannes: the buyer map Irish films actually travel

A European viewer meets an Irish film as a title. The industry meets it as a calendar. February is Berlin and the European Film Market. May is Cannes and the Marché du Film. August is Locarno, where a documentary or a first feature can still be a discovery rather than a confirmation. Those three Swiss-German-French coordinates are not a holiday circuit. They are the buyer map on which Irish sales agents, producers and Screen Ireland stand staff try to turn a cut into a territory, a festival slot into a minimum guarantee, and a conversation into a finance plan for the next film. MSMN’s discovery and arthouse pieces asked how audiences find Irish work. This piece asks where buyers find it — and why a small-market film that misses these rooms has to invent a fourth geography.

This is not a predictions column for Palme rumours. It is an Ireland/EU desk look at the published infrastructure.

Berlin in February: the first market of the year

Screen Ireland’s own Berlinale page is unusually plain. The Berlin International Film Festival shows about 400 films; the European Film Market is “an important market for buying, selling and financing independent films,” attended by over 500 companies and more than 9,000 producers, buyers, sales agents, distributors, exhibitors and financiers. Fís Éireann has had a presence at EFM since 2008, hosting a stand at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. For 2026 the agency told industry the festival and market would begin on 12 February, with the Irish stand at #G8. Registration with Screen Ireland is not accreditation. A badge is a Berlinale product. The stand is a meeting room with a flag.

That distinction matters. A European reader who thinks “Ireland at Berlin” means a competition title is watching the wrong room. Most Irish business at EFM is sales and finance: a project in development hunting a German or French partner; a completed film hunting a Benelux distributor; a documentary hunting a public-broadcaster pre-buy. Berlin’s brand is political and auteur. The market’s function is winter cashflow. Missing it does not mean the film is bad. It means the film’s first professional audience is smaller, later, or already committed to someone else’s slate.

Screen Ireland’s membership of European Film Promotion is the network layer. EFP is the only international grouping of agencies dedicated to marketing European cinema worldwide. The Irish stand is therefore not only a national hospitality desk. It is a node in a European sales diplomacy that also runs Producers on the Move, Shooting Stars and a dozen other labels. A buyer who will not take a meeting with a first-time Irish producer may still take one with an EFP-framed package. That is how small markets borrow a corridor.

Cannes in May: the pavilion that is not a badge

Cannes is the louder twin. Screen Ireland’s Cannes pages describe the Marché as one of the largest film markets in the world, with more than 30,000 professionals accredited in a typical year. The Irish Pavilion sits in the International Village. For 2026, registration opened in March; the festival dates were 12–23 May. Membership of the pavilion is again not market or festival accreditation. It is a staffed desk, meeting space, terrace and a place to store a backpack while a producer walks the Palais. Screen Ireland will not fix a late badge.

The pavilion’s published purpose is fourfold: Irish films selling; new titles coming to market; Ireland as a location; and Section 481 as a conversation. That last item is why a Cannes drinks invitation is industrial policy. A French or Korean financier who already understands a 32% credit and a 40% VFX band is cheaper to close in Dublin later. The 2025 Marché conference strand — “Ireland: a Creative Powerhouse for Production” — was the same argument in a panel title. Animation Day collaborations with Annecy, including Cartoon Saloon’s first-look slots, show the other Irish export: not only live-action drama, but a services-and-auteur animation brand that buyers already know how to spell.

Cannes is also where the buyer map fragments. A sales agent’s Cannes is territorial: Germany here, Italy there, a streamer conversation that may never become a press release. A location manager’s Cannes is inbound. A first-feature director’s Cannes may be a short in a parallel section and a week of unpaid coffees. Treating “Ireland at Cannes” as a single success metric is how you confuse a Palme rumour with a sales report. The useful metric is whether Irish companies left with paper: an option, an MG, a co-production treaty conversation, a meeting that became a finance plan.

Locarno in August: the discovery that is not a market hall

Locarno is the third coordinate because it still behaves like a festival first. It has industry activity. It does not have Berlin’s Gropius-Bau grid or Cannes’ village of pavilions as Ireland’s primary published infrastructure. What it has, repeatedly, is a place where an Irish or Irish-co-produced film can be a discovery in a way the May market no longer allows for mid-budget work.

The 2025 example is public and precise. Celtic Utopia, a feature documentary co-developed by Sweden’s MDEMC and Ireland’s Plainsong Films with Creative Europe MEDIA European Co-development support, won the Grand Prix of Critics’ Week at Locarno. The film follows a wave of alternative folk and traditional musicians — names a European music desk already knows — and was not a Section 481 studio picture. It was a co-development file that used a Swiss critics’ week as a world stage. A year earlier, Irish-language horror Fréwaka used Locarno as a world-premiere launch. Those are different genres and different companies. The pattern is the map: Locarno as the late-summer slot where a small-market film can still be new to buyers who spent May confirming what they already wanted.

For a household this is not trivia. The film you later stream in Rotterdam or Cork often had its first professional life in one of these three rooms. If it never entered them, it needed a fourth path: a streamer house commission, a national-broadcaster slot, a diaspora festival, or a digital premiere that CRESCINE would call presence without discovery. Locarno, Berlin and Cannes are not morally superior. They are where European independent cinema still prices itself.

How to read the map without a badge

Three tests will tell whether the Irish stand was a hospitality suite or a market.

One: Did an Irish film that was not already a streamer talking-point take a territorial sale out of Berlin or Cannes? If the only “wins” are inbound productions discussing Section 481, the pavilion served location, not authorship.

Two: Did a Locarno or Berlin premiere convert into a European theatrical or VOD life within a year, or did it remain a festival credit? That is the CRESCINE conversion problem in a tuxedo.

Three: Could a first-time Irish producer get into the room without already knowing the buyer? EFP programmes, stand staff and accredited markets exist to answer yes. If the answer in practice is no, Ireland is renting a corridor it cannot walk.

Screen Ireland cannot buy a Palme. It can keep paying for G8, a village pavilion, and the emails that tell producers the badge is their problem. The unfinished work is the same as the discovery file: make sure the sale becomes a finding. A buyer map without a viewer map is a trade fair. Treat the calendar — Berlin from 12 February, Cannes 12–23 May, Locarno in August — as industrial infrastructure, the way Section 481’s 2028 horizon is treated.

Sources

• Screen Ireland, Berlinale and EFM: https://www.screenireland.ie/promoting/efm-berlinale
• Screen Ireland, Fís Éireann at the 2026 Berlinale and EFM: https://www.screenireland.ie/news/fis-eireann-screen-ireland-at-the-2026-berlinale-and-european-film-market-register-now
• European Film Market: https://www.efm-berlinale.de/en/home/homepage.html
• Screen Ireland, Festival de Cannes et Marché du Film: https://www.screenireland.ie/promoting/irish-in-cannes
• Screen Ireland, Irish Pavilion registration 2026: https://www.screenireland.ie/news/registration-for-the-irish-pavilion-at-the-2026-cannes-film-festival-and-marche-du-film-is-now-open
• Screen Ireland, Discover Irish Film at Cannes / Marché 2025: https://www.screenireland.ie/news/discover-irish-film-at-the-festival-de-cannes-and-marche-du-film-2025
• European Film Promotion: https://www.efp-online.com/
• Creative Europe Desk Ireland, Celtic Utopia Grand Prix, Locarno Critics’ Week 2025: https://www.creativeeuropeireland.eu/news-events/celtic-utopia-is-grand-prix-winner-at-critics-week-locarno-film-festival-2025
• Screen Ireland, Section 481: https://www.screenireland.ie/filming/section-481-1