Newly-elected President wants to shake up film finance, festival independence, and the Korean Film Council. And to be nicer to North Korea.
The election of Moon Jae-in as the new president of South Korea heralds multiple changes for the cultural and entertainment industries. The country has the world’s 12th largest GDP and the sixth largest film industry.
A liberal and former human rights lawyer, Moon won a landslide 41% of Tuesday’s vote while his predecessor Park Geun-hye languishes in jail. She was impeached and stripped of her presidential immunity. She now faces criminal charges for corruption and abuse of power.
Moon, who was sworn in on Wednesday morning, says he will reverse policy in many of the areas where Park faces legal proceedings.
Supported by her collaborators including former culture minister Cho Yoon-sun and chief of staff Kim Ki-choon, Park was involved in blacklisting more than 9,000 anti-government culture industry figures. The blacklist was compiled to exclude artists and companies from state-controlled funding programs.
“The blacklist is a national violence (against art and artists) that infringed upon the fundamental basis of democracy, ” Moon said in April.
Park’s abuses of power may have caused enduring damage to the workings of government in the arts sector, something that Moon says he will undo.
He wants the resignation of the heads of state organizations, such as the Korean Film Council (KOFIC) , which played along with Park’s manipulations. It was recently revealed that the Korean Film Council attempted to twist public opinion by justifying drastic budget cuts to the troubled Busan festival in a newspaper column that it submitted anonymously. KOFIC chairman head Kim Sae-hoon is now on the point of resigning.
The three years of woes at the Busan festival were sparked by the Busan city mayor interfering in the festival’s programming in a bid to protect the image of Park. Moon has gone on the record to say that mayors should not be allowed to concurrently serve as festival heads. And Moon would provide an institutional strategy to protect film festivals’ independence and autonomy.
During Park’s regime, a state-controlled funds-of-funds, which almost 40% of Korean films access each year, was diverted to give more support to pro-government, nationalistic movies. Critics say that fund manager, the Korea Venture Investment Corporation, operated as a de facto censor. Moon says he wants to reduce the size of the profit-seeking fund, currently worth $880 million (KRW 1 trillion,) so that the difference can be put into art house and indie titles.
Moon is also promising to reform the powerful family-run conglomerates (a.k.a. chaebol) that dominate Korean industry. Chaebols have long had close relations with government and politicians, and stood accused of unfair business practices including awarding contracts to affiliates and forcing price markdowns from subcontractors. Korea’s top entertainment firms — Samsung, CJ and Lotte —are all explicitly muddled up in Park’s bribery and influence trading scandal.
But if reforming the conglomerates is a tough task, so too is remaking the country’s international relations. Here too, there is an entertainment industry component.
In the last year, China has adopted punitive measures against the previously successful Korean entertainment, tourism and cosmetics industries as retaliation for the installation of the U. S.-made Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system. Korea-China co-productions have been cancelled and Korean actors have even had their faces blurred out on Chinese TV. Advocates of THAAD says it is necessary to protect against threats of missile and nuclear attack from North Korea.
Moon has been circumspect about THAAD. As a candidate, he said that the deployment deal should be “reviewed” and that decisions should be left to the next administration.
On North Korea, Moon wants to end the hard line pursued by Park and her predecessor Lee Myung-bak. Moon would bring back the “sunshine policy” and dialogue with the North. Moon argues that the previous decade of conservative government confrontation had done nothing to arrest North Korea’s nuclear program.
Speaking on RTHK, Wednesday, Tufts University professor of Korean studies Lee Sung-yoon, said the election of Moon represents “a step forward for democracy, and a small step back for security.”
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