South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has tied a major film-investment commitment to an argument that will resonate far beyond cinemas: artificial intelligence should expand human creative opportunity, not displace the people whose work gives movies their meaning.

Opening the Lumière Summit at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Lee said the Republic of Korea would commit €500 million, cited as $581 million, to its film industry. France is making an equal pledge. The arrangement, proposed by Korea and welcomed by France, is called the Lumière Partnership.

Its stated design is both domestic and international. The two countries intend to use investment to strengthen their own screen sectors while also supporting bilateral co-productions. In Lee’s framing, the larger objective is to give locally rooted work a stronger path to worldwide audiences rather than treating international success as something that requires sanding away a story’s identity.

That idea matters in an entertainment landscape where a handful of global platforms can put a series in front of enormous audiences, while the systems that sustain local production, independent filmmaking and movie theaters face intense pressure. Lee’s speech connected those pressures instead of presenting them as separate problems: the future of cinema involves financing, cultural exchange, audiences, creators’ rights and technology all at once.

The Lumière Partnership’s film-industry goal

The €500 million Korean commitment will match France’s pledge, making the two countries’ announced investment total €1 billion. Lee described the partnership as a way to combine national investment aimed at revitalizing each industry with co-productions between the two nations.

Co-productions can matter for reasons that go well beyond placing two flags in the opening credits. They may connect producers, crews, performers, technical specialists and distribution relationships across borders. In the best-case version of the plan described at the summit, the partnership provides local content with a platform from which to reach a global market, while keeping the local perspective that made the project worth making in the first place.

Lee emphasized that Korea’s ambitions are not limited to a France-Korea relationship. He expressed hope that the Lumière Partnership can grow into something with wider relevance for film and visual media internationally. That is an appropriately broad ambition for a summit named for pioneers of moving images, but its practical success will ultimately depend on how investment and co-production mechanisms are structured over time.

The speech also made room for independent cinema, which Lee called the industry’s future and a driver of sustainable growth. His point was that experimentation in independent filmmaking can reshape cinema’s established grammar. It is a useful reminder that commercial scale and artistic renewal do not always arrive through the same door. Big productions can support jobs and visibility, but new visual language, new forms of storytelling and new voices often emerge where experimentation is possible.

Korea, Lee said, intends to be a dependable partner to independent cinema through its multilateral commitments. For fans of international film, that emphasis may be as significant as the headline investment figure. A healthy screen culture needs pathways for work that is not engineered solely around familiar franchises, algorithms or the broadest imaginable audience.

AI must serve creators, Lee says

Lee’s clearest policy message concerned AI. Referring back to the San Francisco AI Declaration from July, he argued for responsible, human-centered development and for a future in which the benefits of the technology become fair opportunities for everyone.

He did not frame the challenge as a simple choice between embracing technology and rejecting it. Instead, he named the issues that make the creative-sector debate so consequential:

  • Falling employment within the film and visual-media industry.
  • The cloning or imitation of actors’ voices and likenesses.
  • Copyright questions that remain unsettled.
  • Disputes around the data used to train AI systems.

Those are not abstract concerns for screen industries. Films and television are built from creative labor, performance, craft and rights. If a voice can be replicated, a face can be digitally copied, or an artist’s work can be incorporated into training data without a clear answer on consent or compensation, the debate quickly becomes personal. It touches not only stars, but also writers, animators, designers, editors, musicians, translators and every other creator whose contribution might be treated as raw material rather than human work.

Lee characterized the hurdles as mountainous, but he did not argue that the answer is to wall AI off from filmmaking. His position was that the technology should be used on a foundation of human-centered values and should support human development. In an industry defined by stories and emotion, that distinction is central. A production tool may accelerate a task; it cannot, by itself, settle the questions of authorship, dignity, permission and cultural value surrounding its use.

There is also a wider audience perspective. Viewers may encounter AI-assisted work without always knowing it, particularly as synthetic performances and generated material become more sophisticated. The call for responsible development is therefore not merely a workplace issue. It is an argument for preserving trust between artists, industries and the public.

The discussion lands during a period when cinema’s communal qualities are being defended in especially visible ways. The appeal of event screenings and large-format presentations shows why the theatrical experience remains distinctive; for one example of the format’s continuing pull, see the plans around Star Wars’ 50th-anniversary IMAX 70mm presentation.

A warning sign for theatrical exhibition

Lee also used data from South Korea to underline how sharply the cinema business has changed. In 2019, South Korea ranked first globally for cinema attendance per person, at 4.3 visits each year. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, annual admissions in the country surpassed 200 million. Last year, that annual total had fallen to roughly half of its pre-pandemic level.

The figures give weight to the concern that theatrical moviegoing cannot be taken for granted, even in a territory with an exceptional cinema-going tradition. Streaming has made screens and catalogs more accessible, but it does not replicate a theater full of people responding together to a film. Lee’s position was not sentimental nostalgia for an older business model. He argued that the theater experience people remember needs to be passed forward to younger generations.

His proposed route is straightforward in concept and difficult in execution: make movies audiences feel are worth seeing in cinemas, then make a deliberate effort to bring younger viewers through theater doors. That demands more than marketing. It raises questions about ticket affordability, programming, convenience, release strategies, local theaters and whether audiences believe a big-screen trip offers something that cannot simply be postponed until a title arrives at home.

The final answer will vary between countries and films. Still, the Korean attendance figures make clear that no market is immune to the post-pandemic recalibration of theatrical habits. Investment in production, support for independents and attention to audiences cannot be separated if the aim is a lasting exhibition ecosystem.

Local stories with global reach

Lee grounded his argument in Korean works that have already traveled widely: Parasite, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, the series Kingdom and Netflix’s Kpop Demon Hunters. Lee Chang-dong attended the summit. The examples span film and series storytelling, prestige recognition and streaming-era reach, but they point toward one shared idea: specificity is not a barrier to an international audience.

Lee invoked a Martin Scorsese line, “The most personal is the most creative,” to make that case. The point is not that every local production will become a worldwide hit. Rather, industries seeking international relevance do not necessarily need to imitate the least distinctive version of global entertainment. Cultural specificity, in this view, can be an asset.

It is also why the AI section of the speech fits naturally beside the co-production and local-content sections. If countries want their stories to travel, the people who make those stories must retain meaningful creative agency and rights. A global future for screen entertainment that erodes the human creators at its center would contradict the cultural promise Lee described.

A centennial moment for cinema history

The summit arrived in a year marked by three film centenaries. Lee noted the 100th anniversary of Don Juan, identified as the feature film that ushered in synchronized sound; the centenary of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, described as the oldest surviving feature-length animated film; and the 100th anniversary of Na Woon-gyu’s Arirang, a foundational work in Korean national cinema.

The Arirang reference carried particular cultural meaning. Lee said the film’s theme song came to symbolize the soul of the Korean people. Together, these anniversaries make a fitting backdrop for a summit grappling with technology. Cinema has always changed through technical developments, from sound to animation and beyond. The question raised by Lee’s address is not whether innovation will shape screen culture. It is whether institutions and industries will ensure that innovation remains answerable to human creators and audiences.

Lee ended with a quotation from the Lumière brothers about the intense shared feeling generated when a thousand people become, for a moment, one audience. That image captures the thread running through the speech: investment should strengthen the conditions for people to create, stories to move across borders and audiences to experience cinema together.