(Above): Excited visitors gather at an Outdoor Greeting with the cast of The Day After.
Since it began in 1996, the Busan International Film Festival has emerged to become the leading film festival in Asia, in the process upstaging its earlier counterparts like the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) in size and scale [1], as well as the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), which BIFF initially planned to model after [2]. In this essay, I will explore how BIFF came to status as the premier film festival in East Asia and how the successful expansion and diversity of its programming gave it an edge over the HKIFF, which initially sought to be the go-to-international platform for Asian cinema in the 1980s [3].
The relationship a film festival shares with its audience is one of the most essential and defining elements of any festival. According to film critic Darcy Paquet and Davide Cazzaro, a festival’s audience imbues the event with an additional dimension and they observed how the “passion and sophistication” of its audience defined the festival, allowing it to flourish into a high-profile event in the international film community [4]. Back then, BIFF was a completely unprecedented event for South Koreans, who had never received such a wide access to films all over the world, in part due to a screen quota enforced since the 1960s which limited the entry of Hollywood films.
The long-standing hothouse atmosphere at BIFF is apparent to this day in the festival’s film screenings and ancillary events that actively engage audiences, who respond in kind: visitors clamour to ask questions during the “Guest Visits” at this year’s BIFF; “Open Talks” and “Outdoor Greetings” are routinely packed with visitors, who are willing to brave even the rain to see film celebrities; long queues form outside the box office in the wee hours of the morning, with some tickets being sold out an hour after opening. This year, the 22nd edition saw attendance shoot up by 17 per cent from last year to record 192,991 admissions.
In a personal interview with Roger Garcia, executive director of the Hong Kong International Film Festival Society, he explains how this mass fervor for cinema influences BIFF’s programming in catering to a populist taste, something he finds “admirable”. This is compared to the HKIFF, which Garcia describes as an “arty-farty curated audience festival” that targets more cinephiles, given the fact that the range of their audiences’ tastes are not as diversified. He notes:
“For our audiences in Hong Kong, their interest and curiosity in cinema is not as great as I would have hoped for and I’m a little disappointed by that. But the audiences at BIFF seem pretty open, adventurous and enthusiastic about movies in general. From what I see, they tend to go watch many different types of movies.”
It is not surprising how BIFF’s rise in the film festival circuit has unfolded in tandem with the prosperity of the Korean film industry. “A film festival is only as good as its national cinema”, asserts Garcia. Indeed, the advent of “New Korean Cinema” during the 1990s and 2000s, with the emergence of new auteurs like Lee Chang-dong, Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho as well as Korean classics such as Peppermint Candy (1999), Joint Security Area (2000), Memories of Murder (2003) gaining acclaim, coincided with the growing prominence of BIFF from 1996 onwards [5].
But the Hong Kong film industry in comparison has been steadily shrinking in the last three decades, with declining production alongside an increasing number of co-productions with China. Fewer than 70 films were made in 2004, a stark contrast to over 200 made a year in the early 1990s [6]. The HKIFF’s rise in the late 1970s and 80s was in kind driven by the emergence of the Hong Kong New Wave in the early 1980s, with filmmakers such as Ann Hui, Wong Kar-wai, Fruit Chan and Allan Fung putting Hong Kong cinema on the world map. BIFF’s success has also been propelled by South Korean audiences’ strong national pride, which has driven the consistent interest and support of the festival’s wide showcase of Korean films every year. In particular, nationalistic or historical films have traditionally been successful, with this year’s The Battleship Island: Director's Cut and A Taxi Driver in the Korean Panorama section raking in box-office receipts in their prior commercial releases. Such support for local films is less apparent in Hong Kong according to Garcia, who believes Hong Kong citizens tend to “undervalue” their national cinema.
BIFF’s consistent venture into the Southeast Asian territory has helped to maintain the diversification of its Asian cinema programming, with Philippines, India and Nepal being emerging hotspots for cinema in the region in this year’s edition. Its opening films in 2013 and 2015 were Bhutanese film Vara: A Blessing and Indian film Zubaan respectively, and Bangladeshi closing film Television was screened in 2012. This year, hot, critically acclaimed titles included Smaller and Smaller Circles by veteran Phillipines director Raya Martin and Nepalese films Goodbye Kathmandu and A Curious Girl.
In contrast, the HKIFF showed a lack of foresight in their decision to focus on East Asian programming, instead of quickly capitalising on the developing film industries in the SEA region — UK-based Asian cinema film outlet Eastern Kicks reported how Southeast Asian cinema was “largely under-represented” at the 39th HKIFF in 2015 [7]. This is something Garcia, who spearheaded the HKIFF’s focus on Asian cinema and brought in acclaimed filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Nagisa Oshima to Hong Kong, believes is “unfortunate”. The HKIFF began with the goal of being the hub of Asian cinema in the 1980s and initially focused its attention on Southeast Asian cinema from countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore [8].
Since the 2000s, however, the festival has been placing increasing emphasis on ethnic Chinese cinema, from Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, most evident when it celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2001 [9]. As compared to BIFF’s regional focus on the entirety of Asian cinema in its 10th anniversary, Soojeong Ahn notes how HKIFF’s focus on the notion of Chinese cinema instead suggests an “ongoing struggle between the two festivals for pre-eminent regional status and festival identity.”[10] Having left as festival director of the HKIFF after 1980, Garcia agrees that BIFF has since superseded the extent of Asian cinema programming that the current HKIFF provides, by filling a gap in programming his colleagues who stayed on neglected:
“They went more for Chinese language cinema and started to ignore some of the other elements. I don’t think we pushed hard into some of the other areas which we should have done, like looking into the cinemas of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. We went more for the more classical stuff; mainstream stuff like the three Chinas type of films and Japan and then we looked at Korean cinema.”
The HKIFF may have chosen this unique direction to further differentiate itself from BIFF, but in recent years BIFF in turn has been putting more attention on Chinese language cinema. This year, Asian films at BIFF examined the position of the rapidly thriving Greater China cinema and its emerging trends. Despite escalating tensions with China over the recent missile saga, with film festivals in China banning Korean films, there were no shortage of Chinese films at BIFF.
According to the festival’s Korean cinema programmer Nam Dong-chul in a personal interview, Chinese independent or small-budget films can pass through to Busan more easily, unlike commercial big-budget Chinese films that may possibly fall under government control. He also cited the example of Taiwanese closing film Love Education, whose Chinese investors were initially afraid of submitting the film to BIFF, but the film eventually managed to come through due to director Sylvia Chang’s insistence to be in attendance. Besides Love Education, there were 26 other films from Greater China, including Taiwanese film The Bold, The Corrupt And The Beautiful and Chinese film Ash that were nominated for the inaugural Kim Ji Seok award. Chinese film End of Summer, Hong Kong film Somewhere Beyond the Mist and Taiwanese film The Last Verse were three out of 10 films premiering in BIFF’s prestigious competition section New Currents.
In conclusion, BIFF’s rise to the status of being the premier film festival in Asia was fueled by the constant enthusiasm and adventurous tastes of its Korean audiences, which gave the festival the confidence and ability to program a wider diversity of films. The buzz created from the audience atmosphere also attracted attention from the international film community, gaining increased publicity and talk of the festival. BIFF’s strategic Asian programming also contributed to its success, thanks to its continuous efforts to discover new talents from Southeast Asia which allowed it to fill a gap among Asian film festivals that HKIFF neglected. It should also be noted that while the SGIFF’s niche is in Southeast Asian cinema, the festival’s considerably smaller scope and scale than BIFF has never posited it as BIFF’s direct competitor in claiming the title as the hub of Asian cinema, unlike the HKIFF. Simultaneously, BIFF subsumed HKIFF’s subsequent Chinese language cinema niche to bolster its programming to an all-encompassing one that covers the entirety of Asia, ultimately gaining an edge over the HKIFF. With that, BIFF is truly well-deserving of its title as the hub of Asian cinema among the other film festivals in the international film festival circuit.
[1] Ahn, SooJeong. The Pusan International Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalization (TransAsia: Screen Cultures). Hong Kong University Press, HKU, 2012, 75.
[2] Slater, Ben. Years of Plenty, Years of Famine. Histories & Memories of the Singapore International Film Festival. Singapore Internatonal Film Festival Ltd, 2014, 15.
[3] Ahn, The Pusan International Film Festival, 133.
[4] Cazzaro, Davide, and Darcy Paquet. BIFF x BIFF. Busan: Busan International Film Festival, 2015, 35.
[5] Paquet, Darcy. New Korean cinema: breaking the waves. London: Wallflower Press, 2009, 4.
[6] Chow, Vivienne. "Handover Hangover: Hong Kong’s Film Industry Faces an Uncertain Future." Variety. May 18, 2017. Accessed November 30, 2017.
[7] Konior, Bogna. "39th Hong Kong International Film Festival." Easternkicks.com. December 18, 2015. Accessed November 30, 2017.
[8] Cheung, Esther M.k., Gina Marchetti, and Esther C.m. Yau. "Introduction." A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema, 2015, 200.
[9] 10 Ahn, The Pusan International Film Festival, 134.