As film festivals proliferate, their struggle to remain meaningful, to be of use, becomes more urgent. Yet a recent visit to Jeonju, in South Korea, showed one possible way forward.
In national terms, the festival is an underdog, overshadowed and out-resourced by the goliath that Pusan, held in October, has become. Nevertheless, it has carved out its own niche, with a programme dedicated largely to independent and experimental cinema, and under the banner of the Jeonju Digital Project, has embarked upon a funding venture with implications far beyond its own limits.
Originally intended to assist Korean directors, it broadened its focus last year to concentrate on Europe, and commissioned half-hour shorts from three very different film-makers: Haroun Farouki from Germany, France's Eugene Green, and Portugal's Pedro Costa. This year its organisers looked still further afield, to Africa, providing writer-directors from Burkina Faso, Chad and Tunisia with $50,000 each, to shoot a film on HD video.
Why Africa? Jeonju's programme director, Jung Soo-wan, mentioned an epiphany she'd had while attending an Idrissa Ouedraogo retrospective at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2006 (and unsurprisingly, that film-maker, one of the founding fathers of African cinema, is one of the three showcased here). But more tellingly, she also expressed the belief that it is Africa which will benefit most from the digital revolution, and she made it clear that Jeonju wished to be involved from an early stage.
Their support took the form of a single payment, with no strings attached. "We wanted to give the film-makers complete freedom," said Jung, who also served as producer on the project. "We didn't want to dictate what they made. There was dialogue between us, of course. Discussions as to what would be required, the length of shoot, and so on. But no control on what they wanted to do."
The project produced at least one major work - Expectations by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, from Chad, further demonstrated the mastery evident in his features Abouna and Daratt, with an anguished parable of a man shamed by his failure to escape the third world for the first. Imbued with his customary visual elegance, it made its political points discreetly and well, and built, like all his work, to a quietly devastating conclusion.
By contrast, Tunisian Nacer Khemir delivered a sincere but ultimately narcissistic study of a film-maker (played by the director himself) in crisis; Youssef Chahine would be proud - and that's no compliment. Ouedraogo, meanwhile, continued the sad decline of his recent work, with a single-take tale of adultery and retribution that seemed first clumsy, and finally ludicrous.
A mixed bag, then, as one might expect - but traditional notions of "quality" might not be the point here. Initiatives such as these are, after all, textbook examples of festivals looking to harvest fields they themselves have sown. Hungry for product to screen, and desperate for "exclusives" that set them apart from their peers, the more enterprising (and cash-rich) events have elected to commission and create their own work.
Rotterdam, of course, led the way, with the Hubert Bals Fund, founded in 1988 to provide support for "disadvantaged" film cultures around the world ... in return for which, the festival gains a slate of works to world-premiere. The fund currently spends approximately €1.2m per year.
Jung spoke with passionate enthusiasm of "the complete independence" of the works Jeonju had financed, their liberation from any hint of commercial imperative; the films, she implied, were pure works of art. Yet in doing so, she tacitly acknowledged that short films in general - and these in particular - can barely exist these days outside of the cloistered environment of a festival such as this one.
But it also opens a further can of worms: do these bequests, however well-intentioned, equal a form of colonialism? The Hubert Bals Fund, after all, seems to reward only one particular kind of film-making: slow, introspective, faintly contemptuous of traditional narrative or, for that matter, or mainstream audiences. Proclaiming itself a liberator, it in fact puts its film-makers in a ghetto and keeps them there, far from the cloddish attentions of the mainstream.
By contrast, a number of international critics have argued in recent years that French money, used to finance film-makers such as Kyrgyzstan's Aktan Abdykalykov, or China's Yu Li
, has radically transformed those directors' aesthetics, obliging them to adopt the visual grammar of "western arthouse cinema". It's the opposite of the Bals dilemma: a case of wanting to reach other audiences, and making the necessary compromises - but losing one's own voice in the process.
For the record, neither Saleh Haroun's nor Ouedraogo's films seemed anything less than quintessentially African. Still, the question of patronage remains, provoking and perplexing, defying easy answers.
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