On 18 and 19 October 2019, the conference ‘Research methods in film studies: challenges and opportunities‘ took place in Ghent. The conference was organized by the ECREA Film Studies Section and sponsored by the Popular Communication Division of NeFCA. The conference welcomed 99 delegates from all over Europe and beyond, resulting in 63 presentations and three keynote talks: Barbara Flueckiger (Zurich University) opened the conference with an impressive overview of how she has applied digital tools for the analysis of historical film colors, Catherine Grant (Birkbeck, University of London) made a convincing plea for ‘playing’ with editing tools as a method to acquire aesthetic insights into films, and Richard Dyer (King’s College London) closed the conference with an outstanding talk on textual analysis (which he defines as ‘making sense of films’), thereby analyzing serial killing in films.