Film development fund

Korea’s Film Development Fund has run since July 2007 at approximately US$430 million. The composition is the part to know by heart: US$172 million from government, US$172 million from a 3 percent box office ticket levy collected through 2014, and US$86 million carried over from the pre-existing fund.

Roughly forty percent of it therefore came from the audience, automatically, without anyone having to win an argument in a budget committee every year. Government money matched it rather than carrying it. That is a different political object from an annual appropriation, and it is the difference the course points at.

What the fund is spent on is published and is smaller than people assume: about US$8.6 million seeding mid-size investment funds of roughly US$25.8 million each, US$2.25 million for independent and low-budget art features, US$2 million for international co-production, and about US$2.6 million a year for screenplay market and research support. Set that against the Korean film subsidy total, which even on the most generous accounting was US$106.28 million in 2011 against EUR676 million for France. The fund is a capital structure, not a firehose, and the boom it is credited with began roughly a decade before it existed.

Source: The Korean Film Council’s own introduction page, free at https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/mobile/other/intro.jsp , states the size, composition and deployment figures. The subsidy comparison is from Jimmyn Parc, A Retrospective on the Korean Film Policies: Return of the Jedi, European Parliament, free PDF, Tables 1 and 2. Both are compiled in sections 1.5, Instrument G and 1.7 of the Hope cases research map.

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