Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “I hope we can communicate and reconcile again,” said Busan Mayor Park Heong-joon on the opening night of the South Korean city’s film festival.
With so much of the dialogue in opening drama “Because I Hate Korea” discussing Korean societal rigidities, group loyalties, long working hours and poor pay (which cause the protagonist to emigrate to laid-back New Zealand), it is easy to forget that many of these characteristics are what may have saved this year’s Busan International FIlm Festival from going off the rails.
Mid-year, the festival’s aging senior management had a self-inflicted meltdown (a senior moment?) when chairman and co-founder Lee Yong-kwan set off a chain of events that caused multiple resignations, highlighting the old city-versus-festival political divide and alienating local sponsors and industry guilds.
This was dirty laundry that Busan should have washed out of its system in the years-long aftermath of the 2014 “The Truth Shall Not Sink With Sewol” debacle, which caused a previous round of bitter infighting.
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