Korean film industry organisations have rallied together to protest the recent shutdown of Gangneung International Film Festival (GIFF).
The fourth edition of the festival was due to run November 3-9 but GIFF announced at the end of July that it had been cancelled following a special general assembly meeting.
Organisers stated this came in the wake of Gangneung city mayor elect Kim Hong-kyu’s “coercively notifying [GIFF] chairman Kim Dong-ho of the festival’s cancellation on June 28” and that the festival would be looking for new ways forward.
In a statement, 23 industry organisations including the Korean Film Producers Association (KFPA), the Federation of Korean Movie Workers’ Union (FKMWU), the Association of Korean Buyers and Distributors of Foreign Films (KBDF), and Fipresci’s Korea branch said: “International film festivals are not the exclusive property of local heads of government.”
With film festivals in South Korea generally majority-funded by local governments, the organisations also decried “a movement in other local governments besides Gangneung to use [the justification of] budget and administrative support to damage the identity of international film festivals” and declared they would “no longer sit and look on at politicians’ misjudgements”.
The statement took issue with the “unilateral” way the festival had been shut down due to “the Gangneung mayor’s opinion that expected effects compared to input is not great,” and went on to call this “anti-cultural behaviour that infringes upon the rights of film people and citizens/audience members that love films.”
Mayor Kim, speaking at a press conference in July, said that he was planning to take the $1.8m (KW2.4bn) in funding earmarked for the festival and use it for childbirth encouragement policy, saying the festival had failed to find consensus with citizens. His campaign promises had included shuttering the festival.
Veteran producer Oh Jung-wan, who was appointed in April as festival director, could not be reached for comment.
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