The Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) is set to start its own production venture capital firm and a distribution arm.

At a provisional council meeting at the Busan City Hall yesterday, the PIFF organising committee approved the establishment of a venture capital firm tentatively called the Korean equivalent of 'Asia Culture Technology Investment'.

It also approved the launch of a film distribution company tentatively dubbed BALCON (Busan Alternative Content Network).

The former is to support the film and visual media industries in the Busan area, and the latter to increase diversity in cinema distribution by supporting Asian films.

PIFF also plans to buy rights to the festival's selected films for its Asian Film Archive. The festival, which this year will run Oct 4-12, also approved an additional $430,000 to its budget of $7.9m.

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