ABSTRACT
South Korea’s presence on the festival network is a relatively recent phenomenon. Film festivals like Berlin, Rotterdam, and Montreal were the first contests to reward the beginnings of what would later come to be known as New Korean Cinema. The continuous and growing presence in these events has granted much exposure to Korea’s film culture as one of the leading Asian film industries. The frequent arrival of this kind of cinema in western contests demonstrates that South Korean Film Festivals keep pushing a ‘Pan-Asian’ cooperation to make more visible Asian cinemas with great strength. Additionally, western curators attend their annual appointment in Jeonju or Busan to check how is the South Korean film scene year after year and select the most representative movies from the South Korean film industry. This chapter explores the increase in participation of Korean cinema in festival networks. In order to do so, it examines the programs of different international film festivals between 1997 and 2018 and analyses the process of globalization that has taken place in the Korean film industry. In addition, the interviews with western curators serve for completing a deep research of these global transcultural flows.
