Film industry to boycott annual festival amid feud with Busan city

SEOUL, April 18 (Yonhap) — South Korea’s film industry people said Monday they have decided to boycott this year’s Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), as the sponsoring city keeps “denying” the festival’s autonomy.

A task force composed of nine industry associations, including the Korean Film Producers’ Association, Directors’ Guild of Korea and the Federation of Korea Movie Workers’ Union, said they had polled their members for a week from April 1 and more than 90 percent of the respondents voted in favor of the boycott.

It marks the first time in 10 years that the local film industry openly voiced its anger over the BIFF, according to the task force. In 2006, industry members took to the streets to protest the government’s plan to scale down the quota for screening domestic films.

The envisioned collective action added greater uncertainty to the future of Asia’s largest film festival, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. This year’s film festival is slated for Oct. 6-15.

“It is regrettable that we made such an extreme decision with only six months left before the festival’s opening, but film industry people will not attend this year’s event unless the Busan Mayor resigns as chairman of the festival organizing committee and the grounds for ensuring independence and freedom of expression of the festival are laid,” the task force said in a statement.

The feud between the festival authorities and the Busan city government began last year when the government demanded the resignation of the festival’s executive director Lee Yong-kwan, citing “problems” found in the city’s recent audit of the festival organization. At that time, Lee had one year left before his second three-year term expired. Busan foots around half of the festival’s annual budget.

The move prompted protests from some in the local film industry who took the city’s demand to be a retaliatory measure against the film festival’s screening of a controversial film despite the city’s request not to do so.

The documentary “The Truth Shall Not Sink with Sewol,” also known as “Diving Bell,” criticized the central government’s rescue efforts during the Sewol ferry disaster that claimed more than 300 lives in April 2014.

The feud deepened recently as the Busan city government filed a complaint with prosecutors against Lee and two committee officials on accounting fraud charges following a probe by the state inspector into them in September.

The dispute appeared to die down after Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo offered to resign as the festival’s organizing committee chief amid growing pressure to solve the ongoing feud.

The two sides pitted themselves against each other again after Lee appointed 68 new members to the festival’s advisory committee shortly ahead of the organizing committee’s regular full session. The advisory committee members have the right to elect the festival’s new executive director.

The Busan city government sought a court injunction to keep the appointment from coming into force, which the Busan District Court accepted last week.

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