Busan Film Festival to Honor Its Founder Kim Dong-ho with Korean Cinema Award

For this year’s Korean Cinema Award, the Busan International Film Festival will be honoring one of its own — the event’s founding OG, in fact.

Kim Dong-ho, who established BIFF in 1996 and ran the event for its first 14 years, will receive the prize at the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct. 6. The award goes annually to figures who have advanced Korean cinema’s standing in the world — and few, perhaps, are as worthy as the founder of the festival himself.

When BIFF launched in 1996, Korean films were still routinely submitted to government censors for pre-screening before public exhibition. Kim refused to put the festival’s program through that process, a stand that established BIFF’s independence, won the trust of filmmakers across the region and helped turn a first-year event in a Korean port city into the leading cinema showcase in Asia. The festival became the meeting ground and incubator for the Korean directors who would sweep the world in the early and mid-2000s, contributing significantly to the broader Korean cultural wave that continues today.

Kim brought a rare but essential combination of skills to BIFF’s early days — a bureaucrat’s background but a cinephile’s instincts. He spent roughly three decades at what is now South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, rising to vice minister. He also served as president of the state film body now known as the Korean Film Council, as well as founding president of the Seoul Arts Center. After stepping down as festival director in 2010, he stayed in the field as dean of Dankook University’s Graduate School of Cinematic Content, chairman of the Presidential Committee for Cultural Enrichment and, later, chairman of BIFF. He has sat on festival juries at Cannes — where he presided over the Un Certain Regard section — Rotterdam and Fukuoka.

At age 85, Kim, quite improbably, began work on his first feature. His full-length directorial debut, the documentary Mr. Kim Goes to the Cinema, premiered as a special screening at BIFF’s 30th edition last year and opened in Korean theaters in February, when he was 88. Shot as the pandemic emptied theaters worldwide, the film follows him around the globe in conversation with filmmaker friends, including Bong Joon Ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Tang Wei, Luc Besson and the Dardenne brothers about what purpose cinema now serves. He had previously directed a 2013 short, Jury, and was himself the subject of Walking in the Movies, a 2024 documentary that played Cannes Classics. 

“I feel deeply moved and humbled to be recognized by the very festival I helped establish and served for over 15 years,” Kim said in a statement released Thursday. 

The 31st Busan International Film Festival runs Oct. 6-15. Kim will be honored at an opening ceremony that also hands Michelle Yeoh the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award and Ann Hui the Chanel-backed Camellia Award, with Pachinko star Kim Minha hosting.

“Even today, I attend more than ten film festivals each year to promote Korean cinema,” Kim added, “and I hope to continue this journey for as long as I can.”