Soojeong Ahnthe BIFF fashioned itself as a regional “hub” that appeals to a regional cosmopolitanism, and in
so doing we are left with many questions. Why has the BIFF tried to formulate a regional iden-
tity? And further, how do we account for the BIFF’s regional approach in the increasingly com-
petitive global economy? To address these issues, I will first look at the ways in which the BIFF’s
regionalization process is closely related to the logic of market functionalism which has become
prevalent in East Asia, particularly since the 1990s (Berry, Jonathan, and Liscutin 2009, 13). It is
widely observed that the rapid growth of cultural industries and economic- oriented globaliza-
tion in South Korea prompted the establishment and success of the BIFF (Kim 1998; Ahn 2012).
More specifically, strategies for urban regeneration and the establishment of film markets, such as
the Asian Project Market (APM), formerly known as the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP),^4 demon-
strate the way the BIFF established its brand as a market-oriented festival. Second, I explore the
way that this regional move reveals inevitable contradictions and tensions in positioning the
festival in a national and regional context. The festival’s complex politics of programming puts
Asian and Korean cinema at its core, showing that the BIFF has attempted to negotiate a place
between the national and the regional within rapidly changing national, regional, and global
circumstances. The ambivalences of the national/regional identity that the festival formulates
are frequently at odds with the changing political, historical, and economic contexts such as the
Screen Quota movement^5 and the lifting of the ban on Japanese cultural products.^6 Overall, it is
my contention that the BIFF provides a unique discursive site through which to understand
the tensions and negotiations among cultural and economic forces in the region. This chapter
also aids our understanding of the “complexities of alliances, identity and interest” that today’s
cosmopolitanism in Asia represents (Cohen 2004, 141).
towards a market-oriented film festival to represent the region
Over the past three decades, the number of film festivals worldwide has increased rapidly and
become a global phenomenon. Their recent proliferation in non-Western regions deserves par-
ticular attention as it has occurred in a context very different from the establishment of Cannes,
Berlin, and Venice, and other prestigious film festivals in the West. While the origins of “major”
film festivals are marked by urban regeneration projects after World War II and during the post-
war period, it is distinctive that such events staged outside of Europe have been organized under
the forces of economic and cultural globalization. Since the 1990s, the global prominence of
film festivals in Asia, such as the ones in Busan and Singapore, is closely related to Asia’s posi-
tion in the international economy and the rise of Asian cinema within the global film industry
(Yoshimoto 2000). In this context, mapping film festivals in East Asia is key to understanding the
forces and transformation of the region’s ongoing globalization.
It is widely argued that today’s Asia has become a market and “Asianness” has become a global
commodity (Ching 2000, 244). Indeed, culture has become particularly powerful throughout
the region (Berry et al. 2009, 13). Popular and media culture transcend national borders and
constitute regional identity. In other words, the region’s significance is often emphasized in
relation to the economic role of culture in the region. Within this context, the current emphasis
on culture in Asia closely relates to the profit-driven logic of the market in constituting the
concept of Asia as a region (Berry et al. 2009, 4). Under this circumstance, we observe that
various approaches to the relabeling of “Asia” are being carried out at a moment when, in the
world at large, national borders are collapsing and increasingly giving way to transnational flows
of media, culture, and commerce. The recent discussion of culture in this way is directly linked
to the regional emergence and potential of East Asia (and Asia more generally) to economic
globalization. From this point of view, as Mark Morris proposes, it is a striking feature of the