Gyms vs Movie Theatres

On the 9th of February, 2020, at the David Geffen Theater in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won four Oscars, including Best Picture, the first time ever for a film not shot in the English language.
It was a triumph for Korean cinema – the culmination of a journey we at the FEFF have been promoting since the first edition of the Far East Film Festival, which owes part of its popularity to the discovery of Korean cinema.
In March 2022, unfortunately, the news began to circulate that Korean chain of cinemas CJ CGV (part of the same group that produced Parasite) had decided to take advantage of the height of the ceilings in its cinemas to transform some of the screens in its multiplexes into climbing gyms and indoor golf courses.
The Korean national box office still hasn’t recovered from Covid: films aren’t being released because distribution companies are afraid of not recouping promotion costs, and people aren’t going back into theatres: it’s a spiral that leads to a dead end, the only option being to wait for films to be released on some platform or other.
In Hong Kong in 2022, however, producer Bill Kong of Edko film convened a group of local producers, inviting them to propose projects for films to be produced and shot in Hong Kong.
Just when it seemed that cinema was moving away from the city of lotus flowers – when it seemed that Beijing was becoming the new centre of Chinese movies – Hong Kong filmmaking was reborn, thanks in part to large-scale government funding.
Films were released in theatres there, achieving incredible results: Table for Six (which received its world premiere at the last Far East Film) took almost nine million euros; A Guilty Conscience, whose European premiere we are hosting this year, has taken more than eleven million euros.
To put those numbers into perspective, the highest-grossing Italian film this season, Strangeness, grossed 5.5 million euros from Italy’s population of 59 million people.
The population of Hong Kong is only 7.4 million.
In the year of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, US domestic box office takings surpassed those of China. In both Japan and Taiwan, cinemas never closed, and the recovery that their respective domestic box offices are witnessing seems to indicate that it was the right choice.
In 2023 the Far East Film Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary with a record line up of 78 films, and the selection for FEFF25 is a consequence and a portrait of the dynamism (or lack of it) of cinematographic policies in Asia. And it prompts a question: can you have a national cinema without cinemas? Can cinema exist without theatres? The future remains, as yet, unwritten.