It’s a couple of weeks away from the American Film Market, and I’m busy crossing the Pacific Ocean (both literally and figuratively) in my ongoing search for works to program into next year’s Film Festival. Some of the works I’ve encountered are quite exceptional, others a bit disappointing, and a couple of them, appallingly bad. As for me, an entire fortnight of random observations and impressions upon leaving Busan, South Korea where I attended the Pusan International Film Festival and Asian Film Market have provided food for thought:
• PIFF has seemingly executed a company move inland, nominally, to a pair of multiplexes situated in Centum City, adjacent to the Busan Exposition and Convention Center. The new theaters, owned and operated by competing studio conglomerates CGV and Lotte Entertainment, added no less than twenty screens to the festival’s seating capacity, while the seaside MegaBox cinemas markedly showed the effects of the move: many of the downstairs shops have either lost their leases or relocated. More than a few colleagues who attended screenings at MegaBox observed that the whole joint felt deserted – just the way I felt when I finally made it there for a couple of market screenings.
• The Centum City venues, meanwhile, exuded a sense of newness appropriate for its new locale. The CGV multiplex, for instance, was housed on the seventh and eighth floors of the obscenely massive Shinsegae Department store, an edifice proclaiming itself the world’s largest department store. On the inside, I couldn’t disagree. Boasting floors of designer shops and vendors, an ice-skating rink, art gallery, cinema lounge, a grocery store, and who-knows-what else, Shinsegae felt like Tiffany, Macy’s, Nordstrom’s and Gelson’s all rolled into one, in a concentric design that reminded one of the Guggenheim Museum from hell.
• CGV and the neighboring Lotte theaters have seemingly siphoned the legion of youthful cineastes who flocked to MegaBox when I first came to Busan in 2005. Screenings were well-attended enough, but not as sold out as when I first attended. My first thought was, nearly fifty screens spread throughout the city was too many for a film festival. My other, contrary impression was, the festival needed to grow once again, so of course they would need the extra screens.
In a sense, Busan and its wildly popular film festival reflects the popularity of cinema and its pride in showcasing homegrown product — this in spite of the fact that the worldwide craze in Korean cinema has cooled off for the time being. Yet there were signs that the local industry, and film festival organizers themselves, have taken steps to address the shifting demographics of today’s movie watchers. To wit:
• At many of the theater venues, interactive kiosks promoting anti-piracy efforts were installed in the lobby. While moviegoers were waiting to enter the theaters or perusing festival souvenirs, lines of teenagers and couples viewed a virtual parade of Korean movie stars proclaiming “I’m a Good Downloader,” a mantra repeated over and over on the pre-show trailer before every program. Promoting safe and legal online entertainment practices with a cute campaign slogan was genius, so much so that I spent a good amount of time looking for one of the “I’m a Good Downloader” t-shirts complete with happy-faces, in spite of the fact that my own downloading practices — while legitimate and work-related — may be a little, ahem, questionable.
• PIFF’s parallel Asian Film Market made an opening-day announcement that, starting in 2010, marketgoers with have the opportunity to view market offering via video-on-demand, in addition to the traditional scheme of attending market and press screenings. VOD is a viewing option that has not yet been installed in the firmament of festival screening options, but in the larger framework of serving audiences, there have been examples of VOD being used to full effect for the benefit of audiences and organizers alike. The Hawaii International Film Festival, for instance, organizes one of its short film competitions for emerging short film artists as an online VOD affair, with viewers able to vote for their favorite entry on-screen, in real-time.
Given my previous thoughts on the festival/audience interface and whether we need to fear an erosion of moviegoing audiences, I think we’d have to take a close look at how the realities of interactivity and access will enhance the availability of cinema. And perhaps, alter the landscape of traditional moviegoing.
