During Cannes 2023, Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s Amir Ganjavie interviewed Nam Dong-chul, the Program Director for the Busan International Film Festival. The festival began in 1996 as the first international film festival in South Korea, and it is now one of the biggest film festivals in Asia. The highlights of that interview are what follows.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Can you start by talking about the early days of your festival?
Nam Dong-chul (ND): [In 1996] many Koreans didn’t think it was possible to have an international film festival in Korea, because we didn’t know how to reach the international market or the international film industry. Only a few can travel to Cannes, Venice, or Berlin.
But some pioneers decided it was the right time to have our own international film festival. They [decided on] Busan because it’s the second largest city in South Korea. And in 1996, Busan was hardly known to foreigners. The city also needed to promote itself. The need to promote the city and to promote the film industry combined to make the International Film Festival in Busan. That was the beginning. Our late Program Director, Mr. Kim Jiseok, wanted to make the festival an international one, but we needed to make it unique. Our main focus would be “Asian cinema,” because before then, no film festival focused only on Asian cinema. Busan was the first international film festival that focused on Asian cinema.
(UM): And how do you define Asian Cinema? Is it by the nationality of the filmmaker? The country of origin? The financer?
(ND): It is not easy to define one category or standard. It’s a combination. The main production country is the most important. We’ll also consider the nationality of the director or the actor. It is a little bit tricky. For example, Tran Anh Hung, is a Vietnamese filmmaker living in Paris. We regard his films like Cyclo as Vietnamese. But more recently he’s made [Western European] films that we regarded as non-Asian films.
(UM): Can you speak a little about your selection process? Do you prefer films from distributors? Do you go to festivals like Cannes to find films?
(ND): At Cannes we screen films, and there are many meetings with sales companies and distributors. That’s one way to collect films. The other way is that we open a submission website for direct submissions. The deadline is the 19th of July. Every programmer watches all the submitted titles and then decides on the final selection.
(UM): And do you have any quotas for gender, race, or geography?
(ND): We just care about Asian Cinema, Non-Asian Cinema, and Korean Cinema. We divided it pretty evenly between the three categories.
(UM): Korean Cinema is very prominent and strong right now. Do you try to transfer your knowledge to other Asian countries?
(ND): We are an international film festival, so we have our own funding system, our own market. We also have an education program, the Asian Film Academy. It is an almost-twenty-day program that recruits new Asian directors and producers. We bring them to Busan, where they make a short film during the day during the film festival. It’s kind of an education program.
Also, on the market side, if they have a project, we have the Asian Project Market, where they can show their project and try to find a co-producer for the film.
(UM): Do you have prizes?
(ND): We have many awards, most with monetary prizes. We also have the Asian Cinema Fund to support with post-production or script development.
If you receive a good movie, but it comes from an authoritarian country, or it’s about a controversial topic, like anti-abortion, is it a film you’d consider programming?
We only care about the movie itself. We don’t have censorship, no restrictions about the subject matter, or funding.
(UM): Is there anything else you’d like to add?
(ND): Busan is known as the film hub of Asian films. We try to be good supporters of Asian cinema. And we want to be a bridge between Korea and the world.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.