Asia’s top film festival will go ahead next month despite a threatened boycott by some local moviemakers seeking guarantees of artistic freedom, its head said Tuesday.
Kim Dong-Ho, chairman of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), urged filmmakers to end their boycott and vowed to guarantee the festival’s independence.
“I’m really sorry for what happened to the festival in the past... I’ll do my best to restore the honor of the festival that has been undermined over the past two years,” he told journalists.
The prestigious annual festival has been embroiled in a bitter row with the municipal government of the host city Busan since the screening in 2014 of a controversial documentary about the Sewol ferry disaster.
The film criticized the government’s handling of the sinking in April 2014 that killed more than 300 people, mostly schoolchildren.
A flurry of official probes targeting the organizing committee and an unprecedented cut in state funding last year was seen as an attack on the festival’s independence. It triggered a boycott threat by an confederation of Korean filmmakers’ associations.
In an attempt to smooth things over, the Busan city government — a major BIFF sponsor — appointed Kim, the festival’s respected former founding director, as new chairman of the organizing committee.
About half of the filmmakers’ groups subsequently lifted the boycott.
Kim on Tuesday stressed that the committee in July passed new rules to ensure the event’s artistic and political freedom.
Kim, 78, was brought in as chairman to replace Busan city mayor Suh Byung-Soo, who was at the center of the fight over the documentary “Diving Bell” in 2014.
Suh said it was “too political” to be premiered at the BIFF, although the screening eventually went ahead.
After that, state funding for the 2015 BIFF was nearly halved and the then-festival director Lee Yong-Kwan became the target of a series of probes by state auditors.

Source: Arab News