Busan Market Chief Sees Virtue in Convergence, Conferences and Crossover as Film Industry Seeks Route out of Turmoil

In the job for five months, Ellen Kim, the new head of Busan’s market has started to put her imprint on the industry component of the Busan International Film Festival.

The four-day market kicks off on Saturday and is expected to welcome slightly higher numbers of executives, booths and conference speakers. Kim says that uptrend may be because of – not in spite of – the current turmoil in the entertainment industry.

The Market’s novelty this year is the Producers’ Hub. What is that about?

At Cannes this year the Korean Film Council (Kofic) operated KoPick and took five producers to the festival. Lee Dong-ha, president of the Producers’ Guild of Korea, suggested that we in Busan do something more to help producers. The Producers’ Hub is modelled on the Producers’ Network structure at Cannes and was not something the Busan ACFM had not budgeted for. But Kofic stepped in to help make this first edition happen. And Korea is the country in focus for this first edition. That will rotate in future years.

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What is happening to the traditional part of the ACFM dedicated to rights sales for finished films

If we only had the sales market, we would not be very sustainable. We have the project market, the story market, and conferences, and now the Producers Hub. That is an ecosystem that functions well.
The trade in completed films is declining in importance and buyers need to be involved at earlier stages of production. They want to participate as producers, or even to acquire IP for themselves.

The sales companies come every year, even though the possibility for the real sales become lower. And to compensate for that we have the online market. But still they prefer to come on-site to meet people, to get new information, to make a network and to watch films.

The festival and market together are working, even if the traditional role of the sales market has changed.
Last year we had about 2,500 registrations and will have roughly the same this time. But our income has increased by about 10%.

We do have a British umbrella stand which is making a return this year. And a new Italian pavilion.

Has the ACFM suffered from the budget cuts that the festival has experienced?

Actually, the overall budget has not changed greatly. The festival has significantly increased its sponsorship and more than compensated for the loss of national government subsidy. And the subsidy from Busan city has increased.

How much does the success or failure of this market depend on the success of Korean cinema?

Box office is certainly weak in Korea. And this year there is no market sales booth operated by CJ ENM. But I’m not sure what to read into that. I see that CJ is doing other things around the festival, so maybe they want a bigger presence that goes wider than the ACFM.

But, in fact, we have more Korean companies coming, such as Megabox, M Plus and other newcomers.
If the ACFM were directly correlated with the Korean box office, we would be in difficulty. But it is actually the reverse. We have really very strong interest from the Korean industry as well as other Asia and global industry

We are expecting more participation. I think they want to look for a solution. They want to know what’s going on, what is the future of the industry, the mixture of technology and content or the balance between film content, IP and webtoons.

I think people will find good information at the market, even though they are suffering from lower box office.

Should the ACFM be making more outreach to the TV companies?

That part of the industry is already addressed by the Busan Content Market, in May. That market is already established and working well. If we wanted to bring in more TV people, we’d definitely work with the BCM rather than compete against it.

What is the thrust of your AI conference?

I’ve been to other AI conferences which were very enthusiastic about AI’s power to enhance individual filmmakers, to help independent filmmakers to express themselves more, and to free them from capital.

Our approach is somewhat opposite. We want to see what how capital works in combining AI and contents. So, the morning session is about like a roadmap of the Asian content industry. IQiyi has its own AI-generated content center. Dentsu is using AI techniques for marketing. And Korea’s WYSIWYG Studios, which comes from a more technical background, is merging with the content industry. We have an IP section, involving Naver Webtoon and story protocol, which is blockchain.

And then in the afternoon, we will deal directly with filmmaking and its combination with AI. We’ll have a demo and talk about workflow changes.

A lot of Chinese companies are taking part in the AI conference. It is like AI is becoming an elite, Chinese-dominated industry.