hankyoreh

The administration and local governments have been caught conspiring to hurt the international prestige of South Korean cinema and its industry. First, we saw the petty antics of the city of Busan and its attempts to politically manipulate the Busan International Film Festival. Now, the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) is triggering a backlash in the film community by trying to introduce an advance review system for the country’s film festivals. Basically, it is trying to change regulations in the Promotion of Motion Pictures and Video Products Act granting exceptions to advance ratings reviews for KOFIC-recommended festival pieces.

Its aims are easy enough to figure out. Last month, KOFIC withdrew its review exception recommendation for “2015 Euratchacha Independent Films,” a feature exhibition at the independent film venue Indiespace. As a result, three films with “restricted” ratings could not be shown. One of them, called “Self Referential Traverse: Zeitgeist and Engagement,” was a documentary intended to lampoon President Park Geun-hye. By announcing plans to change the regulations on ratings review exemptions, KOFIC is basically declaring plans to institutionalize this very kind of interference. It’s the same thing we saw when Busan pressured the festival last year not to show “The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol,” a documentary on the April 2014 Sewol ferry sinking. The aim is prevent anything that displeases the administration from finding its way onto festival screens.

There’s a reason festivals over the years have been granted an exception to the ratings reviews. A festival is an occasion for cinema professionals and clued-in audiences to gather and observe new possibilities and future trends in film - a banquet, if you will, of the cinematic spirit of openness and adventure. Tightening the noose of prior censorship will not only gravely hurt the festivals’ standing but also stifle the artistic imagination for cinema as a whole. Certainly, we can’t expect the administration to play its self-professed role of “guiding film as a creative industry.”

It’s even more distressing to see this happening with KOFIC just after the chairman’s helm there was taken over by Kim Se-hoon, a former member of the Institute for the Future of the State, which has served as a think tank for Park Geun-hye before she was president. Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo, the person behind the film festival flap there, is another leading Park loyalist. Add into this the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s controversial declaration that it would “only select works of pure literature as ‘outstanding reading,’” and it’s impossible to erase the sense that freedoms of culture and arts are under a concerted attack from the administration. This sort of unsavory interference in film, and in culture and arts as a whole, signals a willingness to cast aside even the most important values for the sake of political interest. Hopefully, this childish and foolish attempt will be stopped before the country becomes a complete global laughingstock.

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