Author: rb809rb

Hollywood’s appetite for Asian stories has broadened, but for Lionsgate’s Helen Lee-Kim, “every movie is still a fight.”

Lee-Kim, the studio’s president of international, made the remark at the Busan International Film Festival‘s Asian Contents & Film Market during the panel “UTA × Gold House: Hollywood & The Asian Diaspora,” moderated by Variety‘s Asia Editor Naman Ramachandran.

The discussion brought together representatives from Lionsgate, UTA, Gold House Studios, Hybe America Studios and East West Bank to examine how Asian stories can reach wider audiences without sacrificing their cultural identity.

Lee-Kim said pandemic viewing, despite the disruption COVID brought to the industry, exposed audiences to films across languages and helped make language less of a barrier. Asian content can attract viewers beyond Asia, she said, with a compelling concept remaining central to its commercial appeal.

She pointed to “Karoshi,” the action thriller starring Teo Yoo and directed by Takashi Doscher, as an example of bringing Asian talent into Hollywood filmmaking. Such projects still require studios and distributors to take individual creative bets, she said.

UTA’s David Park cited “Parasite” and “Squid Game” as breakthroughs that demonstrated possibilities once difficult to imagine. Their success has expanded the routes available to Asian filmmakers beyond moving to Hollywood and working in English, he said.

Discussing Na Hong-Jin’s Korean project “Hope,” Park highlighted its ambition, original concept and global genre appeal, with Asian actors in the leading roles alongside international stars.

Park also pointed to “Past Lives” and “Tokyo Vice” as examples of multicultural storytelling grounded in particular experiences. He expressed a desire for more such collaborations to develop organically, cautioning against allowing calculations about global audiences to dictate the work.

Christine Yi, president of Gold House Studios, said the company was looking across genres, without a prescribed category. What mattered was originality and a human, subjective perspective, she said. Its interest in new voices did not require creators to compromise or deliberately internationalize their material.

Hybe America Studios president James Shin emphasized collaboration with artists and Korean creative teams as the company builds its film and television business. Discussing “K-Pop: The Debut,” he stressed the importance of working across cultures through creative partnerships.

East West Bank executive vice president Bennett Pozil, who financed “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” pointed to growing investment activity across Southeast Asia. He cited the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) as an example of funding being channeled directly into the industry, alongside co-production investments in Singapore and Thailand.

His view on cross-border storytelling was shared across the panel as multilingual and multicultural filmmaking opens more paths to audiences.

“Don’t force anything,” Pozil said. “It has to be authentic.”

When Kim Ji-yong read the script for “Possible Love,” its emotional climax, set in a still forest by the beach, had no wind in it. Korean summer storms on location changed that.

The cinematographer behind “Decision to Leave” and “Squid Game” Season 2 asked director Lee Chang-dong to change the scene’s setup, a choice that ended with crew members shaking the trees with ropes.

Delivering a masterclass titled “Cinematography of Possible Love: Quiet, Yet Deeper” at Netflix’s Creative Asia program during the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), Kim detailed how he and Lee built the film’s look around natural light, and how much preparation that choice required.

“Possible Love,” Lee’s first film in eight years, won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at Venice last month and is South Korea’s submission for the international feature Oscar. It screens in BIFF’s Icons section ahead of its Netflix launch on Nov. 6. The drama follows two married couples from opposite ends of the economic ladder: Mi-ok (Jeon Do-yeon) and her laid-off husband Ho-seok (Sul Kyung-gu), and documentary filmmaker Ye-ji (Cho Yeo-jeong) and her husband Sang-woo (Zo In-sung).

For all the film’s naturalism, almost nothing in it was left to chance, not even the weather on the day of the climax.

The team prepared for every windy day announced by Lee’s favorite weather YouTube channel. “And every time, the director would say, ‘There is such a thing as a film ghost,’” Kim told the audience. “But that ghost only appears and helps once we have prepared thoroughly past 100% and put in all our effort.”

The ghost never showed up. Instead, everyone on set except the five or six crew members needed to shoot went into the woods, tied ropes, hung onto them and shook the trees. “The film ghost did not appear. But our staff ghosts on set created this,” Kim said, calling it one of the most memorable moments of his more than 20 years in film.

That tension between the natural and the constructed ran through the lighting too. “Ultimately, the balance was centered on supporting natural light, using film fixtures only to assist,” Kim said. In day scenes, film lights were only used where natural light fell short; at night, the team relied as much as possible on existing streetlights and lamps.

That meant designing around the locations. Lee found the site of rich husband Sang-woo’s vacation home on a real estate YouTube channel, and the team built the house during two months of pre-production, down to the direction and size of every window. “To create that kind of result requires an enormous amount of calculation, planning and preparation,” Kim said. “Compared to any film I’ve worked on, this is the one where we worried, debated and planned the most to make it appear that way.”

Kim’s credits also include effects-heavy productions such as “Ashfall.” “Being human, a certain style inevitably emerges,” he said. “For this project, I wanted to strip those away.”

“Possible Love” was shot handheld with a single camera, except for two dialogue scenes. “If it’s too close, it feels exaggerated, and if it’s too far, it feels like we are cropping, cutting up the frame and peeping in,” Kim said of the camera’s distance from the characters.

With Ye-ji’s documentary at the heart of the story, separating her footage from Lee’s film was another question. “Is making that distinction really necessary?” Kim said. “So we decided not to set it in stone.”

“I wanted to blur that boundary,” he said of the shots from the documentary team’s cameras and his own, which become harder to tell apart as the film goes on. “The reason is hard to explain in words, but it was an intuitive sense that it felt right.”

As for the forest, Kim hasn’t given up on the film ghost. “If I get another chance to work with the director in the future, I hope we can definitely meet it then,” he said.

Namkoong Sun, director of Netflix’s Korean romance “Love Untangled,” said her first commercial feature felt little different from her independent films once cameras rolled, apart from the scale. The freedom, she added, came with weight.

Namkoong was speaking at “New Voices in Film,” an industry panel staged by the Busan International Film Festival and Netflix as part of Creative Asia, alongside Ryu Eun-jung and Song Kwang-min, the married co-directors of the short “My Aunt.”

Namkoong’s first two features, “Ten Months” and “Time to Be Strong,” were independent titles released in theaters. She joined “Love Untangled” when the project and screenplay were already in place, coming on at the adaptation stage, and said the offer landed just as she wanted to find joy again after two films about thorny social problems. A little over a year passed between opening the production office and release.

“Once we went into production, it was a system where we could focus only on the film,” Namkoong said. “There may be upsides and downsides to that. I didn’t want to imagine what would happen if I failed to take responsibility within that freedom. But because that freedom was there, there were definitely things I was able to bring to it.”

Netflix staff sat in on meetings and worked inside the team throughout, she said, and the changes to the script were her own, made in service of what she saw as the film’s theme of happiness. The story is set in 1990s Busan, and with a modest budget for a period piece, the production recreated the Gwangan Bridge under construction to give the film a sense of place.

Her message to younger directors was that a director always carries responsibility for the story, “but within a space where creative freedom is guaranteed, I think you have to take that responsibility really seriously.”

Namkoong said she missed crying and laughing with audiences and cast in theaters, a ritual a streaming release doesn’t allow. “Once it was out on Netflix, people all over the world were watching it at the same time. On Twitter, Instagram, all kinds of social media, everyone flocked in and enjoyed it together, me included,” she said. “Small, sweet romance films don’t make up a big share of the Korean audience. But I was getting messages from people in Brazil and friends in Poland and Colombia saying the film was popular there.”

The film reached No. 1 in many countries and stayed in the global top 10 for more than six weeks, she said, even though it was made in Korean and is “really just a Busan story, a very local story.”

Her earlier releases had harder luck with timing. “Ten Months” premiered in the first year of the pandemic, with festivals shut and cinemas at half capacity. The press screening for “Time to Be Strong” took place on the day martial law was declared in Korea. “We did all the press, went home excited, and then that happened that night, so our news disappeared,” Namkoong said.

“My Aunt” is a 24-minute short. It follows a dog groomer looking after an abandoned dog over the course of one day, when the niece she raised 10 years earlier turns up at her door. It won three prizes at this year’s Mise-en-scène Short Film Festival, where Namkoong served on the jury. It is streaming on Netflix in Korea until December as part of the platform’s showcase of the festival’s prizewinners.

Ryu, who also plays the lead, drew on her own childhood, when she was raised by her fifth aunt, who later took in an abandoned dog. She had no plans to act in it but, having worked as an actor before, took the role herself and asked Song, her husband, to co-direct. Song handled directing on set, the pair shared storyboarding in pre-production, and Ryu led post-production. A previous collaboration had involved shouting matches over the phone, both recalled. This time, both said, speaking to each other without a filter built trust.

Song said he had first felt torn about a Netflix release, given what cinemas offer in image texture and sound, but came to see it as a stroke of luck. On a film-rating app, his previous film drew responses from about 15 people. “My Aunt” has been logged by 7,000 to 8,000 viewers, with more than 1,000 comments.

Namkoong, who was once a Mise-en-scène breakout herself, described the festival as a launchpad for the next generation of Korean directors. “These days, unlike in the past, anyone can upload their film to YouTube. You can screen it anywhere, really,” she said. “But what we do is pick out films and say, these are films that are more like real cinema, these are the films we’d like people to see, and put them on a list somewhere. When that came together with Netflix, the impact became huge.”

Asked by an audience member to name the single biggest challenge facing Korean independent filmmakers, the three directors answered in turn.

“The difficulty in the independent film world, then and now, is raising the budget. But more than that, the biggest challenge is not knowing in advance where a film will go after it’s made,” Namkoong said. “Even when a film is shown at a festival, you can’t tell whether it will get a release, because of what a release costs and various other things. We manage somehow to get it made, but there isn’t the infrastructure, like theatrical infrastructure, to show it.”

Ryu said cost was her main worry with “My Aunt” too. “Independent film is film made independently of capital, so it has to be made with the individual creator’s own money,” she said, noting that platforms for indie film, and interest in it, remain limited. Song, who has always paid for his films himself, named capital as the biggest hurdle but said he had no other complaints. “Shooting films is so much fun. I loved it.”

All three are now writing screenplays for their next projects. Namkoong said she hopes to make a film set in present-day Busan, drawn to the city’s two sides. “It’s a city and also the sea, a tourist spot and also a place where people live,” she said.