By Pierce Conran

Copyright scmp

The crown jewel of the Asian film festival circuit, the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) returns this year for a landmark 30th edition, running from September 17 to September 26.
Coming a few weeks earlier than usual, the festival held in South Korea’s second-largest metropolis has welcomed record temperatures as well as a dizzying array of star guests to its red carpets.
It also features a new festival director, with Jung Han-seok, formerly a programmer at the festival, stepping up to fill a post that has remained empty for the past two years.
Opening its doors in 1996, BIFF immediately cemented itself as a major institution for Korean cinema just before the industry’s local rise in the late 1990s and subsequent global boom in the 2000s.

Beyond BIFF’s intrinsic role in the Korean film industry, Jung points out in an interview with the Post that the festival is also “firmly carrying its role of representing Asian cinema”.
This year, the festival is staging a special “Defining Moments of Asian Cinema” programme, featuring many luminaries of the Asian film industry.
“We put great value on preservation of memories and solidarity within cinema,” says Jung.
Yet this year’s festival is unfolding at a precarious moment for Korean cinema. With dwindling theatre attendance and shrinking production pipelines, many in the industry are concerned about where Korean cinema, following recent commercial and critical highs, can go from here.
Jung, however, sees BIFF as an antidote. “A film festival provides an ‘opportunity’ … I hope the festival inspires audiences to keep returning to theatres once they are back home,” he says.

As an example, he offers the festival’s opener: director Park Chan-wook’s new film No Other Choice, featuring superstars Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin.
“Having this film as the opening title affirms both its artistic and popular strengths while raising audience anticipation and ultimately helping to bring more people into theatres,” says Jung.
No Other Choice, which recently premiered to rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival, is set to bolster local theatrical attendance when it opens on September 24 in South Korea.
Industry observers are also bullish about its chances on the Hollywood awards trail, with many wondering if its mix of humour, visual panache and digestible economic themes could position it as another Korean breakout in America, much like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which stormed the Oscar stage in 2020.

Among several changes, BIFF has overhauled its programming this year, replacing the “New Currents” competition – a section that was dedicated to debut and second films – with a new broader “Competition” section.
“Rather than separating new emerging talents from established or master filmmakers, we felt it was important to create a larger platform where their works could interact with one another,” Jung says.
He points to Lee Jeong-hong’s A Wild Roomer, a New Currents award winner in 2022, as an example of a film that was well received domestically but failed to gain traction on the international film festival circuit.
Jung wonders how Lee’s film, as well as other past New Currents critical darlings, might have benefited from being positioned differently at the festival.

He offers an analogy to illustrate the value of the new competition section.
“Think of it like a young, talented football player,” he says. “Which would be more beneficial for their growth and recognition: playing in the second division among peers of similar level, or competing in the first division alongside seasoned professionals?”
Busan has long been a bastion for identifying and fostering new talent. This year, however, Jung highlighted some of the difficulties they experienced with their programme, which features fewer debut Korean works than past editions.
“Frankly, it was a challenge for us as a festival this year. To put it simply, compared to previous years, the quality of Korean independent debut films was very uneven.”

However, Jung highlights the contributions of Korea’s top film schools, the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) and the Korea National University of Arts (K’Arts), which he says picked up the slack.
He speculates that this could simply have been an off year for new films, or it may be an indication of brewing structural changes in the market, where new talents gravitate towards television and other media as financing for indie cinema becomes increasingly hard to come by.
The schools were responsible for two of this year’s stand-out competition titles: Han Chang-lok’s Funky Freaky Freaks, a K’Arts production, and the KAFA feature En Route To by Yoo Jae-in. Both films focus on marginalised high school characters but with markedly different styles.
Jung has not always been convinced by the function these schools have served in developing new talents. “A film school should cultivate film artists, yet too often they seem to function merely as vocational training centres,” he says.
“This year, however, I felt they finally achieved results befitting their responsibility, as evidenced by these two outstanding works.”

One of the festival’s major changes over the past few years has been the introduction of its “On Screen” section for television show premieres from streaming services, and the enlarged presence of global streaming players across its programming. Netflix opened the festival with its film Uprising last year.
“I don’t believe BIFF’s independent identity has been undermined by the presence of streaming platforms,” Jung says.
When asked about its strong ties with streaming platforms, he elucidates on how the festival is adapting to a changing landscape rather than ignoring the broader cultural flow.
“Our relationship with streaming platforms is not a response to specific industrial circumstances but rather to general cultural ones,” he says.

Like some other festivals in the region, Busan is cautiously staging discussions about AI’s role in film through a selection of talks at the Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM) trade show, which runs alongside BIFF. Jung, for his part, remains sceptical.
“Personally, I side with director Bong Joon-ho, who once said, ‘I want to make films that AI could never make.’ As a traditional cinephile, I am not particularly favourable towards the notion of AI-driven creativity.”
He adds that “humanity has already achieved extraordinary artistic accomplishments even in times when such conveniences were absent”.

Jung does, however, recognise the need to keep an open-minded view and monitor the development of the technology as it inevitably wends its way into the industry.
Speaking of where BIFF is headed after this jam-packed anniversary, Jung does not mince his words: “My goal is simple: to make next year’s edition an even better festival.”
After years of growth, change and turmoil, the Busan International Film Festival looks ahead to its next three decades as a beacon for where Asian cinema is headed.
Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook