Screen quota

A statutory minimum number of screening days per screen per year reserved for domestic films. Korea’s ran from 1966, peaked at two fifths of annual screening days in 1985, and was cut to 73 days on 1 July 2006 in the run-up to a free trade agreement, where it remains. It is not a Korean invention. The United Kingdom pioneered the device in the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 and abolished it in 1985, and Spain, Greece and Brazil all run versions.

The reason the course treats it sceptically is that a quota reserves the room and reserves nothing else. Mandated screen days do not mandate ticket sales, and the Philippines has already run the strongest possible version of the experiment: the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival was effectively a total screen quota handed to independent cinema for one season, and the box office fell by about two thirds.

The disagreement is real and this course carries it rather than settling it. Several Korean studies before 2007 found a positive quota effect. The contrarian reading is that they did not cover the full period and did not control for the pro-competition reforms happening at the same time. What is not in dispute is the second-order effect: the mobilisation Korean filmmakers built to defend the quota in 1999 and again in 2006 was a real political capability, whatever the quota itself was worth.

Source: The legislative history is compiled from section 1.5, Instrument C of the Hope cases research map. The sceptical case is Jimmyn Parc, A Retrospective on the Korean Film Policies: Return of the Jedi, prepared for the European Parliament, free PDF at https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/84084/A-JParc-Brussels-vDec-EN-PE.pdf , section 2, which argues that admissions rather than screen days are the correct outcome measure, that Korea’s Constitutional Court described the quota’s aim as securing exhibition opportunity rather than success, and that the turning points after 1986 happened while the quota was unchanged. Parc himself names the counter-case as Lee and Bae 2004 and Lee 2005.

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