All sorts of brands, from Microsoft to Levis to Motorola, are at Sundance with free merchandise and attempting to get photographed with celebrities.The first major sign of frustration with marketing and branding at film festivals was displayed a decade ago when Slamdance was created as an "independent", non-commercialised alternative to Sundance in nearby Park City. Although Slamdance started with this major bugbear, it has also now succumbed to the corporate buck.It's a similar story at other major festivals, and at the recent Venice Film Festival, the security checks on baggage and compulsory depositing of rucksacks ensured that it was easier to carry around the free shoulder bags given out by the festival organisers, bags that happened to be sponsored by Wella.It is a problem that Times Bfi London Film Festival artistic director Sandra Hebron is mindful of. She says: "There is a school of thought that says that Sundance is being hijacked by its sponsors. It is an interesting discussion and I don't entirely agree with that, because the programming of Sundance is independent of the sponsors' interest."We often have discussion about whether a particular sponsor should be brought into the sponsorship portfolio, and there are sponsors that we turn down, even though their money would have been more than welcome."But for brands that "fit", there is an increasing amount of carte blanche. The London Film Festival markets itself as a public film festival. This means it does not have a competitive section and so does not need to search out many world premieres to put in its selection. Instead, it concentrates on choosing the best films showing at other festivals and giving a first look to some much-anticipated upcoming titles.

This policy sits well with sponsors and as a result they're happy to let the artistic director programme more or less what they want.Hebron adds: "The reason why London began was to bring to the public films that they might not otherwise have an opportunity to see, whereas, with Venice and Cannes, the original impulse was as much about attracting visitors to their towns as it was about anything else."At this year's Venice Film Festival, it was announced that next year there will be a new festival in Rome. It will be a competitive film festival and the stated intention is to rival Berlin, Cannes and Venice. Rome's announcement is all about giving corporations marketing opportunities.Festival directors are hostages to fortune and we're not necessarily offered what's best in artistic terms but what works best for film marketing departments. Film marketing departments love London because it's the perfect opportunity to kickstart buzz for upcoming releases. The promise of stars at premieres is too good to turn down, and it's no surprise that largely American-financed films with big names dominate.Deeper into the catalogue are some of the real gems without distribution that the London Film Festival was set up to showcase. But they are outmuscled in the programme and in prominence by the more sponsor-friendly Hollywood offerings.. Something is stirring in Russia.

A vampire movie, called Night Watch, based on a novel by a child psychiatrist, and directed by a little-known commercials director from Kazakhstan, has become a phenomenon. Part of a trilogy, it's now one of the most successful films ever made in Russia, selling 1.5 million DVDs. Fox studios have snapped it up for distribution in the West, as well as coughing up tens of millions for the third and final part of the trilogy, which will be filmed next year in Hollywood. Even Quentin Tarantino loves it, in no small part because it's a tribute to his hipster style of filmmaking, and has breathlessly called it 'magnificent'. I met the director, Timur Bekmambetov, a bear-like and immensely media-savvy figure (his mother and sister are journalists), earlier this year in Central Europe. He was attending the Czech film festival in Karlovy Vary, and had a gentle,watchful and somewhat self-effacing manner quite at odds with the Grand Guignol pomp of his movie. A few week ago I met him again, in a five-star hotel a short walk from Red Square. Russian cinema, that marvellously austere and cerebral theatre of lost hopes, has been in the doldrums for years.