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With film sales markets becoming increasingly popular events where the film business gathers several times each year, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that they should be understood as events where important gatekeeping process are taking place. That is to say, sales markets are the point where important decisions about films are made, where sales agencies negotiate access to international markets, and where they exert influence over the sort of access given to specific films.

Drawing on qualitative methods such as participant observation and interviews, the author develops a case study of the European Film Market (EFM) in Berlin. The author analyses value creation processes at the EFM, focussing specifically on the disposition of exhibition space and the importance of film screenings.

Drawing on the literature about tournaments of value, the author demonstrates that sales markets endow films with significant values, exercising a powerful role over the process of enabling cultural flow. The author also demonstrates that there is a symbiotic relationship between the EFM sales market and the Berlin International Film Festival, providing a context from which films can generate attention.

The author provides new insights into film sales processes within sales markets, and the role of sales agents in influencing such processes. The author argues that sales markets exert an important influence over gatekeeping by creating social and cultural hierarchies that impact on the sales process of films.

In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” project (BtM). The project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.