The Korean New Wave generally refers to the art cinema produced in South Korea starting in the late 1980s as the country liberalised after several decades of dictatorship and restrictions on free expression. Some scholars make a distinction between a Korean New Wave, which ran from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and a Korean New Cinema that begins around the 1997 economic crisis. New investments from the Korean chaebol conglomerates helped support the new cinema, as did the rise in cinephilia and the concomitant founding of domestic film festivals such as Pusan. Censorship of films was ruled unconstitutional in 1996, and while the chaebol distanced themselves from cinema after the financial crisis of 1997, the national government filled the void with a variety of measures to promote the national cinema and further the ‘Korean Wave’ (hallyu) that eventually made South Korean pop culture an international phenomenon.