Currently in Korea, more than 1,700 film festivals are held per year. This is not a peculiar phenomenon unique to Korea. Film festivals have been on the rise globally since the end of the Cold War era. BIFF was also born out of this trend and has grown to be the representative IFF in Asia. On its 25th anniversary, BIFF is holding a film festival-themed forum with RCCZ.
Film festivals are contact zones where various cultures and values compete and resonate with one another. They are nodes of the film culture in which people from different fields such as art, industry, and policy join forces. Film festivals cause multilateral contact with diverse cultural, regional, and ethnic contexts. This is not only a trait of individual film festivals, but also a trait of the global film festival network, often referred to as a circuit.
Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to dynamic collision, competition, and negotiation of various subjects and contexts at festivals. With this perspective, we will look into how film festivals have influenced the past, present and future of Asian films and discuss the power relations surrounding the festival, considering global geopolitics. We also need to look at how new media and a shifting technological environment put pressure on film festivals to change and offer new opportunities to them.
This is not only a reflection on film festivals, but also an attempt to participate in film festival studies that have been carried out for the last 20 years. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the film festival world is facing an unprecedented and serious crisis, which is also a problem for film culture as a whole. Facing the contactless, or “untact” era, Forum BIFF is going to explore the possibilities of how to create new “contact zones.”
Film festivals are always geopolitical fields. From regional film policy to international cultural politics, a wide spectrum of power relations is present at film festivals. In light of geopolitics, the past, present, and future of Asian film festivals will be examined.
| Moderator | Jeong Seung-hoon(Seoul Nat’l Univ.) | |
|---|---|---|
| Speaker | Lee Sangjoon(Nanyang Technological Univ.) | Asian Film Festival and the Cultural Cold War in Asia |
| Julian Stringer(Univ. of Nottingham) | Film Festivals in Asia: Development Through Global Standards | |
| Chris Berry(King’s College London) | The Geopolitics of Film Festivals in the Sinophone World | |
| Nitin Govil(Univ. of Southern California) | Indian Film Festivals and/as Geopolitical Aesthetics | |