Do South Koreans actually love film?

In the noughties, South Korea earned itself a reputation as the new hotspot for cinephiles. A cultural explosion followed the end of military rule in 1987: on the cinema front, film festivals and magazines sprung up to feed the new curiosity. Attendance more than doubled between 2000 and 2006, when it stood at 153m admissions a year (comparable to Britain's, with a smaller population). The directors who were packing them in the aisles were real-deal cinephiles, too. Many of the so-called "386 generation" who oversaw the Korean blockbusters – Shiri, Silmido, Joint Security Area, Taegukgi – came from the film clubs that appeared at the big universities in Seoul and elsewhere. Democratic South Korea had the film bug.

But how much did South Korea really love cinema? Audiences had been encouraged, by the government, critics, commercial incentives and a protective quota, to consume homegrown product: in 2006, 63% of its box office went to local films – one of the highest rates in the world. Watching the south's sharply cheekboned face-off against whatever communist threat was featured in the latest blockbuster was deemed the patriotic thing to do. But some were sceptical about the nationalist slant of this "cine-mania", as it was dubbed in Korea. After Bong Joon-ho's The Host swept all before it in August 2006, fellow director Kim Ki-duk, didn't mince his words: "When you go to the multiplexes these days, you're immediately grasped by six posters of The Host. Rather than propagating this kind of repressive effect, why don't you build a cinema with 10,000 seats, so everyone can chant 'Dae-Han-Min-Gook!' (long live great Korea!)?"

Perhaps this was sour grapes from a wilful arthouse tearaway. But the suggestion was still valid: there was something narrow about South Korea's brand of cinephilia – at least the commercial end of it. If the South Koreans were genuine cinephiles, or if the claustrophobic marketing applied to their marquee films allowed them to be, then Kim's work – such as the caustic The Isle, or the searching Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring – might play as well in its home country as it did at foreign film festivals.

Other countries, trying to elbow their way on to the global cultural stage in the noughties, also resorted to similar "Your cinema needs you!"-style loudhailing. When Day Watch, the second in the Matrix-esque trilogy produced by Russia's main TV station, was released in 2006, its producer spelt out the deal at its Moscow launch: "This is our cinema, and whoever isn't with us is against us." State-sponsored cinephilia had patchy results there: Russian films never took more than 30% of box office. The disadvantages of the government-led approach began to show in South Korea, too: after the film quota was slashed in 2007, locally-made films dropped below the 40% mark.

Of course supporting the home side is just one form of cinephilia – though you'd hope a strong national cinema would be a side-effect of any culture with a firm interest in film. France is the other country that really springs to mind for raw passion for celluloid: it has done so much to shape the DNA of cinema, from arguably inventing it, through to the New Wave. And the love still resonates today. The UK is supposed to be the exact opposite: mistrustful of cinema's aesthetic haughtiness, more wedded to the cosy domestic certainties of television, and thoroughly in hock to Hollywood when we do fork over our £10 to cross the threshold of the multiplex.

I'm not sure that the level of connoisseurship is the best way of gauging cinephilia around the world (and, short of memory-testing every self-declared film buff on the last edition of Cahiers du Cinéma, it can't be measured anyway). Perhaps the simplest, most non-judgmental method is the average amount of cinema tickets bought per person in a particular country (the per capita figure). Then the cinephile world map, with statistics from 2010, is remade:

1. Iceland (5.4 tickets per person per year)

2. Singapore (4.5)

3. Australia (4.1)

4. US (4.0)

5. Ireland (3.7)

6. New Zealand (3.5)

7. France (3.4)

8. Hong Kong (3.2)

9. Canada (3.1)

10. South Korea (3.0)

Source: IHS Screen Digest

We shouldn't take this chart as the last word on cinephilia either. But there are a few interesting conclusions to be had. One: the aforementioned hardcore cinephile nations – either by design (South Korea) or by heritage (France) – aren't at the top. Two: wealthy countries with small populations and strongly developed cinema infrastructures (Iceland, Singapore, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong) dominate the list. It's obviously easier to maintain a high average under those conditions. Three: despite sliding or plateauing audience figures, the three big movie-producing powerhouses here (France, Hong Kong and the US) are still holding up OK. The US figure, given the much-discussed falloff of the American domestic market, is especially intriguing. If having over 6,000 cinemas is an indication of one thing, it's that your country still adores the movies, even if the love affair has grown a bit stale lately.

Anyway, well done, Iceland: a free all-night showing of Twilight out-takes for you. And the UK? Loitering further down, with 2.7 tickets per person in 2010. I guess we saw Harry Potter, Inception and got bored two-thirds of the way through Tamara Drewe.

Thanks to Charlotte Jones at IHS Screen Digest for the statistics. The London Korean Film Festival is touring the country this week. Details: koreanfilm.co.uk