The case of the Busan International Film Festivalcontemporary popular culture of East Asia that “optimism about the increasing flow and circu-
lation of cultural goods (TV drama, films, a huge variety of music ... fashion) keeps bumping
up against political frictions and ghosts of the not so distant past” (2009, 196). South Korea’s
relationship with Japan, for example, has changed dramatically. Japan, no longer a colonial master,
has become Korea’s regional partner/rival.
From this perspective, the BIFF’s drive to be representative of Asia demonstrates how film
festivals today tend to change their approaches to the global market. With the proliferation of film
festivals, the structure of the festival world has transformed over the past three decades within
a highly competitive global cultural economy. For instance, festivals vie with each other for the
limited number of films produced in the annual festival calendar. Furthermore, their functions
in relation to the global film industry have become more influential and expansive at the levels
of exhibition, distribution, and even production (Ahn 2012). That is, large inter national film
festivals are emerging as a new type of producer through their powerful involvement with the
creative production process via project markets such as the Co-production Market at the Berlin
International Film Festival and CineMart at the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR).
In this sense, the BIFF’s regionalization strategy requires particular recognition, as a demonstra-
tion of the changing regional responses to economic and cultural globalization.
The establishment of the BIFF in a national and regional context
The success of the BIFF can be understood as the result of negotiations among a number of
diffe rent interests, heterogeneous forces, and conflicts (Ahn 2012). Globally, in the late 1990s
East Asian cinema—including Korean cinema—was emerging at Western international film fes-
tivals at this time. At the same time, Asian film festivals, such as the HKIFF, which had long been
a key showcase of Asian cinema for the West, was gradually becoming less important as a plat-
form for Asian cinema. The Tokyo International Film Festival, backed by the major Japanese film
studios, continued to deteriorate, functioning more as a test market for Hollywood blockbusters
(Segers 2003, 2). The BIFF also hoped to take advantage of the brief chasm created in the late
1990s, during Hong Kong’s handover to China, and resultant decline of the HKIFF, to claim for
itself the status of being the new hub for Asian cinema (Iordanova 2006; Elley 2007).
Within the Korean context, although the BIFF was the first international-scale film festival
in the country’s history, significantly, the establishment of the BIFF should be understood in
relation to the sudden proliferation of wide-reaching film festivals in South Korea in the 1990s.
There are a number of factors that prompted the founding of these film festivals in Korea.^7
Among them, it is notable that the successful inauguration of the BIFF benefited from a vacuum
in the national government. The BIFF was established under exceptional circumstances, as Korea
radically transitioned from a military dictatorship to a democratically elected government. This
changed social atmosphere, driven by policies of compressed industrialization and Segyehwa,
the state-led drive towards globalization, propelled the festival into existence (Kim 1998, 185;
Shin 2005, 54–55).^8 Segyehwa, as Kim Soyoung points out, entirely restructured the politico-
economic structure of Korea. There was rupture and aperture as “different interests and ideo-
logies all came into play at the contested intersection of residual authoritarian and emergent
democratic modes” (Kim 1998, 176). In the wake of the formerly powerful labor movement’s
decline during the 1980s, political and social activity faced a new climate in the 1990s. There-
fore, film festivals in Korea were widely seen as a key site of new social groups’ cultural practice,
as the political and social focus moved on to the cultural sector (1998, 178).
There were similar factors that specifically prompted the BIFF’s successful establishment:
most crucially was the city’s newly inaugurated government. The local government in Busan city