The international film festival, which seems to have landed in South Korea by accident in the mid‑1990s, is a historical product. Technically, film festivals in South Korea were a hybrid and indigenous cultural movement that appeared at the crossroads of the Korean democratic movement in the 1980s and the global situation in the post-cold war era in the 1990s. From the 1980s film movement to the establishment of the art house cinema in the 1990s and the Busan International Film Festival in 1996, these developments did not emerge as parallel events, but rather as a culmination of epic tensions. The main purpose of this article is to expand on previous discussions that have never shown much interest in how the international film festival combines global and local aspects. The film movement created by Korean films and the international film festivals of the 1980s and 1990s symbolised the journey to social resonance aimed at communicating with the audience about new Korean films by highlighting ‘agonistics’ and ‘resonance’ between Korean and ‘other’ films.