Film council

The Korean Film Council, KOFIC, is the model this course keeps returning to. It began in 1973 as a promotion corporation that spent its first decade enforcing state ideology, was restructured under a film promotion law in February 1998, renamed a commission in 1999 and a council in 2004. Nine commissioners, one full-time chairman and eight members, all appointed by the culture ministry. It runs production and distribution support, a co-production fund, regional film commission coordination, an independent and art film distribution programme, the national ticketing data system and the film academy.

Read as a design, the interesting part is the layering. A council can hold a fund the ministry does not spend directly, run a school the ministry does not staff, and publish numbers the ministry does not curate. That distance is the whole point of the form, and it is why an industry can end up arguing that a council is more durable than a department.

And then the counter-evidence, which belongs in the same entry. Commissioners appointed by a ministry, holding discretionary grants, can be used to punish. Korea’s council cut the Busan festival’s grant by roughly 45 percent after the festival screened a documentary its own chairman, simultaneously the city’s mayor, had asked it to drop, and Busan was the only festival cut that year. A council is not a shield. It is a structure, and structures have owners.

Source: KOFIC’s own pages, free at https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/mobile/other/intro.jsp and https://www.kofic.or.kr , for the history, governance and programme list. The defunding is reported by the Korea Herald, “Film council slashes funding for Busan fest,” free at https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150505000211 , with the follow-on prosecution of the festival’s former artistic director covered by the South China Morning Post, free at https://www.scmp.com/culture/film-tv/article/1941099/former-director-busan-film-festival-fraud-charges-amid-fallout . Both are compiled in sections 1.5 and 1.7 of the Hope cases research map.

First used in: 4.2 · How Korea’s cinema actually got built