By winning the Oscar’s Best Picture, the Korean film Parasite not only made history, it also set a benchmark for the rest of Asian cinema. What’s our take home?
The remarkable feat of Parasite is not just a fluke or tsamba in our local lingo. It was, in fact, the culmination of decades of sustained growth of South Korean cinema. It was inevitable and, had been a long time coming, to be sure. Korean films have been reaping awards in Cannes and Berlin, Venice and other international festivals. Breakthrough films like Oldboy and Burning helped pave the way for Parasite toward the Academy Awards.
The cultural environment is ripe for it. Korean cinema, together with the entire K-pop culture, has become global as Korean movies and tele-novelas are now ubiquitously watched around the world. Korean movies have even broke global box-office records, like Miracle in Cell No. 7, The Host and Train to Busan. Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook and other Korean directors have directed Hollywood movies, a recognition of their expertise and craftsmanship. Even Korean actors like Lee Byung-hun and Ma Dong-seok have been appearing in some Hollywood movies. South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival has now become Asia’s largest and most important film festival.
As a cinephile for over 60 years now (I saw my first film in 1957), I have seen the rise of Korean cinema in terms not only of output but level of quality. I was a fan of Korean glossy blockbusters and creative genre films, which began to emerge in the late 1990s and 2000s, and started to attract significant international attention. Thanks to the proficient subtitling of their films, the rest of the world acquired a taste for them.
But it should be noted that while they score big in international film festivals, South Korean films are being patronized by local audiences.
Audience support. That’s the key factor in their success. They had a ready audience for them. To me, it’s the missing piece in our efforts to level up our local cinema. In our good-intentioned eagerness and enthusiasm to cultivate new filmmakers through film festivals, we may have forgotten the other part of the equation: the audience.
Sure, we have all these indie film festivals designed to offer films that are a notch higher in terms of content and style than what are being shown in the more mainstream, avowedly more commercial MMFF, Cinemalaya, QCinema, Cinema One Originals and so on. They are held one after the other, year after year. It’s a virtual cornucopia of fresh new films by our young filmmakers. But there is one problem: the mainstream audience does not come to these festivals.
For festival organizers, the gauge of commercial success is so low. An audience of 5,000 for a 10-day festival is already something to brag about. (Disclosure: I am part of the technical working group of QCinema International Film Festival, so I would know).
Maybe Filipino viewers are not made aware enough about these festivals, or they simply resist going to these festivals. So how can we give them a taste of what a good film is when they don’t queue up in spite of the incentive of a much lower ticket price?
The common beef about indie film festivals is that they are closed events; it’s where you see the usual faces—elite and effete film cognoscenti and culturati who are into precious little art films. The dismissive justification is: if you don’t get it, it’s not for you. The upshot is only a few care to watch them. No wonder some cynics say that the term indie is derived from the expression “indie pinapanood.”
True or not, this snobbish aura attached to indie film festivals nevertheless needs to change if festivals are to stay vibrant and sustainable. Rather than be excluded, ordinary citizens need to be encouraged to see these less watched films. They need to be coaxed, beguiled, and won over into becoming appreciative of films not for their star value, but for their content and craftsmanship. Let’s widen the circle exponentially, to include more and more, year after year.
The bottom line: let’s not only make good films, let’s also build the audience—people who will be taught to be critical and demanding. To echo the latest marketing buzz, let’s open up a “blue ocean” market and create new demand for well-made meaningful but engaging films. Let’s make watching indie films fashionable or, should I say, “cool.” That takes education and wider exposure.
In this light, I think Quezon City is in the right direction. Mayor Joy Belmonte hit the nail on the head in her keynote speech at the Seventh annual QCinema Awards, when she broached her idea about film viewers becoming educated jurors of films themselves and expanding the market for QCinema.
Mayor Belmonte said something about campus roadshows, which include the showing of QCinema winners with short lectures and open discussions. That’s smart. Let’s start them while they are young. To bring QCinema’s cinematic feast down to the grassroots, there have also been free film showings in the city’s barangays. Beyond the pleasure of watching, let’s stimulate discussions in the school, with family and friends and our different interpretations of the same film. As Mayor Belmonte puts it: “Cinema is a social activity…the meaning of a movie does not lie solely within the film itself but in the interaction of the film and the audience.”
Indeed, let’s encourage ordinary moviegoers to write reviews and be vocal about films. Sort of turning every moviegoer into a lay Richard Bolisay or Pauline Kael. This way we are actually taking part in the progress of our filmmakers, by pushing the boundaries of their imagination and creativity.
Making a “cinezen” out of every citizen makes business sense. With every “woke” moviegoer, the market continues to expand for quality film festivals, giving the mainstream commercial circuit a run for its money. By giving voice to an ordinary cinezen’s passion for cinema that is meaningful, provocative and progressive, may this one humble opinion stimulate more exciting discussions about the many ways to help put our cinema industry on the global stage (or, should I say, screen) in the years to come.
Let’s hope that other film festival organizers, as well as universities, would invest in pursuing developmental activities along the line of film appreciation and film criticism. Let us build critical, demanding cinema goers who will be the foundation for a vibrant new Philippine cinema that would, one day, make world history like Parasite.
So, hopefully, in the next editions of local film festivals, we won’t see the usual faces again and again.