Film experts from South Korea and the United Kingdom said government support was a key to the success of their cinema industries in an international seminar held Friday in Phu Yen.
The event was part of the 17th Vietnam Film Festival currently taking place in the central province which opened on Thursday evening with the attendance of nearly 1,000 local film professionals.
Simon Farley, Head of Business Development, Creative Industries at British Council Vietnam said the UK had an Art fund which channeled government funding to art and entertainment activities.
From 2008 – 2011, the agency supported nearly GBP 1 billion to 800 art organizations and in 2010, GBP 266 million was given to the cinema industry through policies such as tax refund for film producers.
15 out of the UK’s 20 international award-winning films received some amount of government funding in 2010, he said.
Kim Jung Ah, Cinema Development Executive of South Korea’s group CJ E&M which recently purchased Vietnam’s leading film distributor and Cineplex chain Megastar, said governmental support played a key role in developing Korea’s film industry.
Kim said in the latter half of 1990s, South Korea started to establish the domestic cinema market with competing local distributors.
The 1999 blockbuster “Swiri” by director Je Gyu Kang was a milestone which helped the cinema market to expand. More films were later produced thanks to professional filmmaking, a widespread distributing network and nationwide cinema complexes.
The South Korean government also played a critical role when it ruled that each cinema had to show domestic films to a maximum of 165 days a year. This helped to protect the fledging Korean film industry from foreign movies, Kim said.
In 2006 when this policy was replaced with a 73-day rule, the Korean film industry was strong enough to compete directly with such giants as Hollywood.
Thus, Kim said, only in a decade from 1990 – 2000, the South Korean film industry had achieved a remarkable growth of 20 times and created a “Korean wave” that swept through Asia and other continents.
In response to Vietnamese director Nguyen Vinh Son’s question about censorship, Kim said that Korean government used to impose a censoring mechanism on film scripts before filming started in the 1980s.
However, the process was later abolished as it was thought to restrict creativity. The South Korean government now only puts age restriction on domestic movies, she said.
