Busan Market Chief Ellen Y.D. Kim Plots Year-Round ACFM 365 Platform, Warns Public Funding Has Stalled

The Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM) should grow beyond its four days in Busan into a platform that runs all year, director Ellen Y.D. Kim tells Variety. She adds that public money for the market has not grown alongside it.

Kim calls the idea ACFM 365. It would be a permanent database and matchmaking service that joins the market data in The A Report with the matching work now done by the Asian Project Market (APM) and the Busan Story Market.

Her five-year targets include regular publication of The A Report and a standing leaders’ forum built on The A Summit. She also wants Cinema by Brand to become a financing model of its own and the Asian Cinema Fund to partner with international funds. More delegates from Latin America, the Arab world and Africa could lift the number of countries represented past 60, and possibly above 70.

“The biggest obstacle is funding,” Kim says. “The scale and the role of the market have grown quickly, but public support has not kept pace. National funding for ACFM has stayed at the same level for two years running. The film industry is small in scale, but it is the front-runner that opens the way for other industries. Supporting film is an investment, not a subsidy, and a market needs to be understood as industry infrastructure, not as an event.”

ACFM is in its 21st edition this year. Last year, industry registration rose 14.4% and overall attendance rose 13.5%. This year there are 339 exhibiting companies and institutions from 32 countries and territories, 17% more than last year. Tech exhibitors went from seven to 18, and national agencies and film commissions from 62 to 79. Thailand, the market’s first Country of Honor, has 28 exhibitors. Japan, the ProducerHub Focus Country, has 46.

Kim credits curation for the growth. The market kept its core strands and added ProducerHub, InnoAsia, Doc Square and The A, and these drew people who had never attended a market before. This year’s additions include an Investor Summit, microdrama sessions and Cinema by Brand, which pairs film productions with brand partners.

“The core is cinema,” Kim says. “The Sales Market, APM and the Asian Cinema Fund are the backbone of ACFM, and that structure will not change.” She applies one test to any new program: whether it widens the opportunities for cinema.

“Visibility and revenue are different things,” Kim says. “For much of the Asian content that has succeeded globally, most of the IP and the revenue belong to global platforms or studios.”

In her view, producers need to keep their IP and trade it directly. The Busan Story Market is built for that, and ProducerHub has become a place where producers from across the region discuss creators’ rights and recoupment.

Korea’s numbers look healthy at first glance. First-half box office rose 42% on last year, admissions rose 34%, and Korean films took 64% of revenue. But there were 22 fewer Korean releases, and Korean commercial films averaged a return of minus 33% in 2025.

“Producers say they cannot find money; investors say there are no projects to invest in,” Kim says. “I see this as a rebound, not yet a structural recovery.”

As a result, Korean producers now plan international pre-sales and co-productions from the development stage. The Asian Producers Alliance, led by the Producers Guild of Korea (PGK) and the Association of Indonesian Film Producers (APROFI), will announce its launch at ProducerHub.

New money is also arriving from outside film. Kim points to a conglomerate in India, broadcaster joint ventures in Thailand, mining companies in Mongolia and a beverage brand in China, all of which are backing films. In Taiwan, telecom and media companies have formed joint funds with a public agency. Public money remains the base, through Korea’s Fund of Funds film account, Malaysia’s production rebate and funds in Singapore and Taiwan. But Kim notes that it shifts when policy does.

Streamers are moving from licensing rights to co-financing production, according to country reports in The A Report. In the Philippines, only 32 of 88 first-half releases played in cinemas. In Korea, an industry agreement on holdback windows that was targeted for August did not happen.

One year after InnoAsia’s launch, Mateo AI Studio has raised KRW2 billion ($1.5 million) in pre-Series A funding. The AI feature “Steelay” will be previewed at this year’s Work-in-Progress Showcase and opens in Korean cinemas on Oct. 20. This year’s theme is “Cinema Coevolves with Tech.”

“What concerns me is that institutions and people are not keeping up with the speed of the technology,” Kim says. She also worries that junior crew could lose their training ground if their jobs are automated first. “And if Asia does not own the models trained on Asian languages and images, the IP problem we lived through in the platform era will repeat itself.”

Kim produced “Cry Woman” and “Hanaan.” She tried to co-produce “Hanaan” internationally, but it ended up a solely Korean production shot in Uzbekistan. Today she sees co-productions forming between Asian countries, including a three-way project from Thailand’s M Studio, Japan’s Toei and Korea’s Showbox, and the first financial co-production between Korea and Mongolia. Treaties between Asian countries are still rare.

“Co-production used to be an option; now it is an essential strategy for sharing risk,” Kim says.

The Asian Cinema Fund’s Co-Production Support Fund chose three projects this year, including the new film from Fukada Koji. This year 10 Japanese producers will also pitch projects, including co-productions with Korea, Canada, Indonesia and France.

Asked why companies should come to Busan rather than Cannes, Berlin, Hong Kong or Tokyo, Kim points to the festival and the city. “Busan has the Busan International Film Festival, where the sea, cinema and stars come together, and ACFM is held alongside it. For people who have been coming to the festival for many years, Busan has become something like a hometown: a place with flavors they miss, films they miss and people they miss,” she says.

She also notes that international participants outnumber Korean ones. “For anyone who wants to work with Asia, there is no place as efficient over four days,” she says. “Projects that pass through APM and the Asian Cinema Fund turn up at major festivals a few years later. Busan is where you can meet those films first, at the development stage. Companies from Europe and the Americas know this too, and for them Busan is the gateway to Asia.”