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The South Korean Presidential corruption scandal extends to the censorship of film and art:
South Korea's culture ministry apologized on Monday for a blacklist of artists which excluded them from government support, admitting there was a systematic effort to sideline critics of scandal-plagued President Park Geun-hye. The apology was the clearest admission yet of the blacklist of cultural and media figures critical of the impeached leader that has led to the arrests of her former chief of staff and the culture minister at the weekend for abuse of power.
"It is distressing and shameful that the ministry, which should have been the bulwark for freedom of artistic expression and creativity, has caused questions of fairness in assisting culture and arts with a list of artists to be excluded from public support," Vice Culture Minister Song Soo-keun said.
The blacklist, part of which was seen by Reuters, contains the names of thousands of actors, writers, film directors and others. It includes acclaimed film directors like Cannes award winner Park Chan-wook, Venice Film Festival top prize winner Kim Ki-duk and actors Moon So-ri and Song Gang-ho. None was immediately available for comment. Faced with a political crisis earlier in her term, the government and state entities used the blacklist as "guidelines" to penalize artists and censor content, a special prosecutor's office investigating an influence-peddling scandal said last week.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 24 2017, @08:27AM
Korea is one of the few countries in the world where local films outsell hollywood films without a quota (like China which, iirc only allows 20 hollywood films in theaters per year).
And that's because KOFIC has carefully nurtured top notch talent. Korean new wave cinema is some of the best in the world.
Lots of people have suspected this list existed, although the scope of it is much larger than expected.
The names mentioned in the summary are on the list because they were involved in making a documentary about the utter mishandling of a ferry accident that killed 300 people and during which the president was mysteriously absent for7 hours.