Kim Dong-ho busy in his “retirement”

As we got on the elevator at the Grand Hotel the other day, a Busan film fest regular greeted Kim Dong-ho saying, “Oh, hello, Mr. Kim! Busy in your retirement?” Probably only half joking because almost all the regulars know Busan’s founding festival director can barely be described as retired.

Although he ostensibly, officially left the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) after the 2010 edition, Kim has continued to play a part as honorary festival director welcoming guests, travelling to other festivals, and occasionally smoothing out problems for the organisation. By the end of this year, he will have gone to at least eight overseas festivals including Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Locarno.

At the Opening Night reception this year, the French government awarded him the Chevalier dans l’Order National de la Legion d’Honneur medal for his contribution to Korea-France relations.

Since last July, he’s also been working as head of South Korea’s presidential committee on cultural prosperity. He has circled the country three times since last year, starting with a round of metropolitan cities and then rounds of smaller ones and towns, meeting with veteran and up-and-coming professionals in the arts to discuss how to develop the creative economy and make their lives better. He has also attended the Istanbul Expo and gone to China for the opening of cultural institutions this year.

Largely thought of as one of those cushy governmental appointments given to prominent retirees, the position doesn’t even require him to go to the office on a regular basis. People who have worked with the industrious and tireless man laugh that Kim has probably nonplussed all his subordinates at the committee by taking such a hands-on approach to his job and coming to work at the office every day he’s not out of Seoul.

Dankook Graduate School of Cinematic Content

In addition to all this, Kim has also set up and is running the Graduate School of Cinematic Content at Dankook University. In its third year, the school has turned out feature films that have gone to festivals such as Locarno and Berlin. This year, they have director Kim Daehwan’s End Of Winter in Busan’s New Currents competition.   

Kim recounts how as soon as he “retired” from the festival, a board member at Dankook contacted him about setting up a cinema-related grad school that could differentiate itself from others.

“So for about a year, I met with many professionals to research what is needed most in the film industry right now. One of the things was 3D and 4D professionals, but many others were dealing with that. What I found what we needed was to develop storytelling abilities, a planning and production system, and directing abilities. So we decided to select and nurture students in these three areas,” he said.

He put together an impressive faculty that included producers such as Jaime Shim (Cart, Revivre), Eugene Lee (Cold Eyes) and Oh Jung-wan (Untold Scandal) and directors such as Park Ki-yong, who was head of the Korean Film Academy of Arts for seven years, Kim Tae-yong (Late Autumn), and Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer).

Oft-times Park Chan-wook scriptwriter Jeong Seo-gyeong (Thirst) teaches storytelling and leading Hollywood script consultant Dara Marks also teaches every summer.

The grad school’s students produce feature films, and towards this end, Kim got industry support from major investor/distributor Lotte Entertainment to sponsor KW400m ($394,000) a year for three years. At a classic Busan-style soju party hosted by Kim Dong-ho and the school on Saturday (Oct 4), a representative of Lotte Entertainment promised he would try to get the school’s films shown on affiliated Lotte Cinema screens in Seoul.

Dankook has also initiated a feature film co-production scheme with schools in Australia and China.

“We’ve created a triangle collaboration with Griffith Film School in Brisbane and the Beijing Film Academy. Students are pitching projects at the festival this year and five students from the winning project will go to Brisbane to develop it in a workshop and shoot. Next autumn, they will go to Beijing to do post-production. I thought it was very necessary to have the three countries’ students work together,” said Kim, adding the Korea-Australia co-production MOU signed Oct 4 in Busan and the recent Korea-China co-production agreement would likely invigorate exchange between the three countries’ audio-visual industries.  

The school has also signed an MOU with Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts so Dankook grad students will attend workshops at the LA-based school.

So Mr. Kim is indeed busy in his retirement.