Forgot password

 

During this year’s 20th edition of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, KoBiz had the opportunity to sit down with new festival director CHOI Yong-bae, formerly a producer known for his work on BONG Joon-ho’s The Host (2006), among other titles.

 

 

International film festival is a very precious asset for those in the Korean film industry. Recently, for various reasons, the film festivals in Korea have lost that value as a cultural asset. By being the director of BiFan, I hope to bring the festival back to its early days, when it was still an event that viewers and filmmakers could be excited about.

 

 

As a producer I believe my role in making a film is to find the right experts in different fields to create a good combination. Such as the screenwriter, the cast and director of photography best suited to shooting a project, the composer, etc. I strove to provide them with the best possible environment to work in so that we could make the best possible film. I see my role as the director of this festival in more or less the same way. We have programmers and what we call the industry program experts, as well as internal staff that create the flow of the festival. I think the mechanisms of a festival and film are quite similar in that sense. One of the most important things in my role is to provide and facilitate the needs of the programmers in order to create the best program possible. I wanted them to be able to visit any festival around the world and I listened to their suggestions as to how to bring in better films.

 

 

In the recent history of Korean cinema’s growth, most of the change happened from the late 1990s until the mid 2000s. This was a period of fast growth and development for the Korean film industry. By that, I mean the expansion of different genres. Up until that point, the industry had only made dramas and comedies. We felt it was impossible to create this wider spectrum of genre films. The first film that marked that change was Swiri (1999), which presented a significantly larger scale and flamboyant action scenes, which were not thought possible before. Since then a lot of different films have come out, including Memories Of Murder (2003), which I believe showed the potential for the sophisticated thriller, and also A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003), which I think made another mark as a sophisticated horror film. There was also a wave of new costume dramas, such as Untold Scandal (2003), Forbidden Quest (2006) and King And The Clown (2005), which I believed challenged viewers’ conception of these dramas as boring. Considering these, and films such as The Host (2006), these experiments in genre have given filmmakers here the confidence to make other works, such as monster films, which we previously didn’t have the technology for. This opened another door and expanded the possibilities in the industry. Reflecting this change the most is possibly the recent film TRAIN TO BUSAN, by YEON Sang-ho, which in prior years would have been seen as a genre B-movie and restricted to a smaller audience. Yet, it was blown up to the size of a well-made commercial blockbuster. This all stems from this expansion of genre in Korean film.

 

 

One of the roles of film festivals is to introduce films to audiences and hopefully even to distributors. In Korea, this largely means Korean films, but also other Asian films. Another role is to facilitate networking between film professionals and provide a ground for discussion on co-productions, remakes and imports/exports. The third function is to provide an environment for industry experts to come and talk about the future of the industry. The Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF), which is having its ninth edition this year, facilitates one part of this, but not everything that I think we should cover. This is why we’ve added different industry programs. As part of the Korea Now program, we’re staging an SF Fantastic Forum with the Producers Guild of Korea (PGK). I found out that they were trying to develop the sci-fi genre in Korea a few years ago but then they stopped, so I decided to resuscitate that for this year and bring in some foreign guest speakers to participate in a forum to discuss how we can develop sci-fi content here in Korea. There have been many Korean-Chinese co-productions recently and we’re staging a case study of SHIN Terra’s Bounty Hunters, starring LEE Min-ho, to showcase this kind of co-production. We also have a guest speaker who handles judging, reviewing and approving co-production projects in China, who will talk about the assorted criteria and programs that are available for these projects. We also have another forum with the Federation of Korea Movie Workers’ Union to discuss labor issues in the local industry. There’s been a surge of new content available with VR (virtual reality) technology, which is the focus of the New Media program this year. We’ve built a VR dome outside of City Hall to showcase the new possibilities of this medium. Another new technology is CGV’s ScreenX exhibition technology. There has been very little content to date but here we will showcase a number of shorts made specifically for ScreenX by students of the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA). Because of the nature of fantastic films, which requires special makeup, CG and new technology in filmmaking, I felt that Bucheon should provide a platform for this.

 

 

What I most want to see is BiFan become a must attend event for all Korean film professionals. In order to do that, I think we need to have a high quality of films. The two other major film festivals in Korea, the Jeonju International Film Festival and the Busan International Film Festival, which take place in spring and autumn, each have their own character. Jeonju takes place in a historical town and has a great food culture, so it’s not just the films. In Busan, there is much cultural value attached to the festival, as well as the ocean and the food which people can enjoy. BiFan takes place in summer and Bucheon doesn’t really offer anything besides its films, so necessarily, the festival has to be known as a destination for great films. If we can bring up the quality of our program, then we will be able to attract more viewers from Seoul and its surrounding areas. We anticipate that we will have a 50% increase in attendance this year.

 

 

 

I would like to improve the theaters as well as accommodation for festival guests. They could be more convenient and pleasant. We are in active talks with the city about that and they are keen to invest more in order to help improve the festival. Regarding the industry program we are talking with the city about turning it into a year-round event, not just during the festival. Film festivals are relatively new in Korea and over the last 20 years we’ve taken inspiration from international film festivals around the world, but now I believe it’s time for Korean film festivals to truly discover their own style.