Busan International Film Festival

Studio Ghibli Honored With 2015 Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award

Aubrey Page — Thu, 17 Sep 2015 14:28:43 GMT

The Busan International Film Festival has chosen Studio Ghibli as the 2015 recipient of their Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award. The award is presented annually to an "Asian filmmaker that has significantly contributed to the development of the Asian film industry and culture."

Studio Ghibli was founded 30 years ago by directors Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, and it has a well-established reputation for its significant animated achievements with films like "Spirited Away," which won an Academy Award, and "Grave of the Fireflies." In celebration of Studio Ghibli's award, the Busan International Film Festival will screen Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro" as part of their Open Cinema slate and Takahata's "Only Yesterday" in the animation showcase.

Studio Ghibli's most recent film, "When Marnie Was There," opened earlier this year.

The Best of New Southeast Asian Cinema: Four Busan Film Fest Highlights

Paul Keelan — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 16:43:05 GMT

Shut out of the fest hits currently circuiting Europe and Asia ("Winter’s Sleep," "Mommy", "Leviathan") which all sold out before the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) homepage could even load, I headed for the festival's Southeast Asian offerings. Here are the highlights of my visit to this under-seen nook in world cinema: three fictional films that transported me from Hoang Lien National Park in Northern Vietnam to the Agusan del Sur marshlands in Mindanao to the apartment flats of Singapore along with a documentary which surveyed Southeast Asian cinema as a whole.

Southeast Asia

"Southeast Asian Cinema: When the Rooster Crows" follows four directors from four different countries: Brillante Mendoza from the Philippines, Eric Khoo from Singapore, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang from Thailand, and Garin Nugroho from Indonesia. Confronted with budgeting censorship and an overall lack of independent filmmaking in these nations, Leonardo Cinieri Lombroso’s documentary showcases the burgeoning directors of Southeast Asia and the problems they face trying to spark a independent moviemaking in their own cultures.

Interviewing directors, critics and actors in Southeast Asia’s film community, Lombroso etches out themes of alienation and cultural isolation in creating art-house, independent cinema within countries that lack the academic literature, the festivals, and the industries to support such endeavors. At the same time, "When the Rooster Crows" suggests that with a lack of social stability in the Southeast Asian governments and societies there is an equally abundant upside in the freedom for idiosyncrasy and innovation.

At a fundamental level the documentary provides a gateway to the filmmakers in Southeast Asia who aspire to create daring cinema and who tailor their works toward global festivals and audiences. Using interviews and clips from Brilliante Mendoza’s work, Lombroso catalogs the Filipino auteur’s handheld virtuosity and immersive POV in the energetic fervor of Manila. The dark underbelly of Filipino life is the subject of most of Mendoza’s films. "Serbis" is a film about a matriarch managing both a tumultuous family life and a porn theater in the seedy provinces of Manila. "Kinatay" follows the media’s hysteria after the tragic and horrific murder and decapitation of a kidnapped woman. "Captive" details a group of hostages harrowing trials after Mindanao jihadists kidnapped a group of tourists from the island of Baracuay. "Lola" examines the plight of the impoverished elderly in properly burying their kin. Mendoza captures the chaotic frenzy through visceral techniques that are so believable that one of his early films was mistakenly labelled a documentary category at a European festival.

It's disappointing that the documentary neglected “Joe” Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand, especially after his recent art-house successes, including the 2010 Palme d’Or winner "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives." But strictly abiding by the structure of a single director per country, "When the Rooster Crows" instead chose the romantic whimsicality of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Thai cinema that spurred a Southeast Asian New Wave in the late '90s. The doc traces the auteur's evolution from emotionally resonant indie rom-coms like "Last Life in the Universe" and the nostalgic "Monrak Transistor" into his latest political and polemical effort, "Paradoxocracy," which was banned by Thai theaters in fear that it might incite fighting in the audience.

In Singapore, Eric Khoo’s edgy "Mee Pok Man," and the provocative festival hit "My Magic" about a rogue carnivalesque magician, provide ideal examples of filmmaking bravado in the tiny multicultural nation. It is fascinating to learn about the ways in which editing and censorship from governmental regulations on multicultural sensitivity infringe upon the works in these nations. With a population and a dogmatic decree for ethnic cooperation between the native Singaporeans, the Chinese, and the migrants from India, the interviews with Khoo and other Singaporeans in the local film industry reflect heavily upon the institutional pressure to acknowledge every race equally and justly. Clearly Southeast Asian cinema still undergoes heavy scrutiny from the government and their narratives waver upon the volatility of local standards in free expression. Indonesia’s regulations are perhaps the most stringent, with a governmental agency in place for overseeing all stages of production. Still, Garin Nugroho’s performative cinematic work "Opera Jawa" and his biopic about a famous oratory poet named Ibrahim Kadir, aptly titled "A Poet," reveals the ability to transcend the silencing forces of religion and despotic authority to create authentic cinema.

The documentary is more of a slight essay than a thorough treatise on the culture and qualities of Southeast Asian cinema. But given the marginalized obscurity of the topic, "When the Rooster Crows" deserves to be watched simply for its power to introduce viewers to new directors and unheralded cinematic movements from exotic and remote regions. But Southeast Asia remains at a preliminary stage of a New Wave: it still awaits the limelight, dormant but active at the threshold of breaking through and into the global circuit.

Vietnam

Kim Quy Bui’s "The Inseminator" heralds a rare and powerful female voice in Southeast Asian cinema. Kim Quy Bui mitigates heavy-handed visual metaphors of procreation with her immaculate compositions. The film’s opening shot reveals a mentally challenged Vietnamese boy named Maize (yes, as in "corn") mimicking the sound of a frog after provoking the frog to make noise by spitting in its face. Squeamish uncertainty is a common reaction while watching "The Inseminator."

Maize believes that he is a frog. His father Mr. Boi believes he is a man who needs to pass on the genealogical seed, subjecting his sister to chauvinism. She becomes an accomplice, a victim. From this central conflict the film provocatively explores reproduction, the tyranny of patriarchy and the familial perversions that are byproduct of Mr. Boi's obsession that Maize harvests a suitable woman from the “Love Market.”

"The Inseminator" is both feminist statement and scathing satire of patriarchy. Filmed at Hoang Lien National Park in Vietnam, "The Inseminator"'s fertile, verdant landscape is apt. In one shot, blatantly symbolic yet aware of its own obviousness, the camera lingers on an earthworm swimming around two eggs in a bowl, transcending cliche by virtue of its inventive, formal beauty. One hallucination shows red babies floating down a river, while another reveals said baby beneath the husks of a corn. Such over-the-top whacky and unoriginal art-house exploits that nonetheless work in "The Inseminator," which has the uncanny tone of familiar cinematic tricks of shock and awe revamped in unsettling and unfamiliar settings. Its lurid images, theoretical rumination and hints of a mythological heritage in Vietnamese folklore work together to gestate an embryonic breakthrough for Vietnamese cinema and for the film's young female director Kim Quy Boi.

The Philippines

"Bwaya," a Filipino film by Francis Xavier Pasion, chronicles the process of grief and personal tragedy of a Manobo family, through the mother Divina (Angeli Bayani, from "Norte, The End of History") and the father Rex (Karl Medina) whose daughter Rowena is killed by a crocodile. As Rex searches the Agusan del Sur marshlands for the body, Divina confronts her resentment toward the schoolteacher (R.S. Francisco) she blames for the accident and deals with the exploits of the media. Gripping, emotionally charged, and featuring a sublimely exotic milieu with naturally beautiful cinematography, "Bwaya" is an incisive retelling of the horrors of a recent tabloid-producing tragedy in the Philippines.

"Bwaya" begins with voiceover about the ancient mythologies of two crocodiles who became separated when the pregnant female could not leave a narrow channel to the sea as a sweeping camera introduces us to the Agusan marshland community on the islands of Mindanao. The prologue soon settles into a schoolhouse setting with the unique detail being that the schoolhouse dwells on water. Like the student's home, the classroom is a floating bamboo shelter. The schoolteacher reminds the children a stipend needs to be paid before they can graduate, a fact of life in poorer regions of the Philippines where education is not funded by the government. Playful, exuberant Rowena and a friend canoe home. Teasing the inevitable, the girl's jump into the water for a swim, arrogantly unworried that it is infested with crocodiles.

Rowena's home life is startlingly sparse: Rex and Divina's floating house has no furniture, and sleeps five or more family members, including a grandmother and other siblings of Rowena's. Dinner is plain noodles cooked with boiled water taken from the lagoon. "Bwaya" quickly dives into Rowena's world and the plight of her family. When she asks for the 800 pesos to graduate she can't do so in writing because both her parents are illiterate. Too poor to pay, Divina must canoe to beg for donations from neighbors. Rowena's 13th birthday is the next day and an Aunt gifts her a medical toy set. Rowena plays doctor with her siblings, and sings a memorized graduation song. The film confronts the dire economic resources (yet resilient humanity) of the Manobo people.

The father eventually discovers Rowena after an undisclosed interval of days. What is obvious in regards to the time between the death and the recovery is that Rowena’s corpse, bloated and pungent, has decayed long enough to become such a health hazard the local guards demand that she be buried immediately.The scene where Rowena's body is recovered from the thick marshland foliage is shot initially from the canoe before cutting to a slow zoom-out shot from an aerial angle. The vastness of the marshlands at a bird's eye angle respects the privacy of the moment while simultaneously illuminating how minuscule humanity is in relation to the environment.

Interspersed with the fictionalized account of Rowena’s tragedy is the actual documentary footage of reporters interviewing Rowena's parents. There is footage of the real burial ceremony of Rowena as she is transported from her first gravesite to a proper casket later. Unsympathetic to the sensitivity of grievance, the interviewers rudely pry into a scandal involving whether the parents stashed donations for the funeral rites away for themselves before begging the local government for more help. The director also (twice) includes authentic footage of Rowena being excavated from the original makeshift burial site which was hastily formed to rid the stench of her decomposing body from infiltrating the town. "Bwaya," which means salt crocodile in the local Filipino Manobo dialect, is both a vindictive and sympathetic account of the disconsolate, hysterical, and sorrowful states Rowena’s family must face to overcome the horrific reality of nature's lethal elements.

Singapore

Lei Yuan Bin’s "03-Flats" is a documentary about the high-rise public housing blocks that renovated 85-percent of Singapore’s slums into affordable apartment flats. It's shot in wide angles, with a static camera and flat composition, mirroring the geometrically precise apartments on display. The film follows three particular flats—Queenstown, Sembawang, Eunos—and the three single women who occupy these spaces. The women’s ages and lifestyles vary: one woman is an artist, one has a cat, and one is geriatric. But the fact that single women are the only demographic showcased in the film is perhaps its biggest flaw: the lack of diversity leaves the documentary feeling myopic, slanted by its narrow focus.

Statistics from Singapore's Ministry of Public housing and quotes from the Prime Minister intersperse throughout the documentary detailing the immense bureaucratic motivations of the housing projects. Most incentives are aimed at domestic families, though they do mention that singles, while excluded from some prioritized perks designated for family units, are not without consideration from the selection process in filling the apartments. Speaking like an ambassador for an utopian state with formulaic political credence, a TV Broadcast near the end has the Prime Minister robotically urging the citizens toward progress. There's a dystopian bent, aimed solely at the support of procreation and the nuclear family. Why not show this demographic: the effects of the cramped apartment of a Singapore flat as inhabited by a family of four? Was the choice of only single woman in the film an active decision or a result of finding only a few participants willing to allow their lives to be filmed? Such questions lingered throughout "03-Flats" and the loss of a variable cast of characters weighs heavily.

Here are the women cooking; Here they are cleaning; Here they are entertaining themselves. Yet again, there is a limited array of things to do living alone in a flat, so it likely wasn't hard to find commonalities to merge between the different subjects. The use of long shots from a static camera allows ample time and space for the eye to immerse itself in the setting: to notice the type of cereal on the counter, the strange way that hangers dangle from the kitchen cabinets. Some images loom with an eerie hints of temporal imprisonment. None express the monotony of a pendulum better than a close-up on a barred window shut off from the outside and sitting just above a bland clock ticking slowly, like the lulling rhythms of the film itself. In fully entering the quotidian intrigues of what transpires inside Singaporean flats, Lei Yuan Bin demands your patience.

Is There a Link Between U.S. And Korean Cinema? The Busan International Film Festival Provides An Answer

Shane Danielsen — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 15:09:49 GMT

I spent a good deal of 2008 living in Seoul, where my wife had taken a twelve-month work contract -- a great, defining year for us both. Though Australian, she feels a deep connection with the country. She knows its history, its culture; she speaks the language. My own perspective was strictly that of an outsider, alternately baffled and beguiled. Even so, it was almost impossible, even for a comparative naif like myself, not to sense at virtually every moment the nation's deeply ambivalent relationship with the United States, the superpower which serves as its ally, protector, colonizer and rival.

South Koreans have adopted American and European popular culture -- fashion, music, social media -- with greater enthusiasm than their Chinese neighbors. And increasingly, their language, and their cities, are filled with transliterated words: a shop might be signposted with, say, HAPPY MORNING, written phonetically in Hangul -- even though those words are meaningless in Korean, presumably because English is a gold-standard to which to aspire.

For nationalists, this is a sign of capitulation to a colonial (some would say, an occupying) power; for most young people, though, it's simple modernity, a welcome symbol of engagement in a country which, for decades, remained almost as locked-down as its angry sibling in the north. (It wasn't until 1988, after the successive tyrannies of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan, that most South Koreans could obtain a passport.)

Either way, I was thinking a lot about this at this year's Busan International Film Festival, which for some reason seemed slightly quieter this year. Regular attendees complained of a decline in numbers and a lack of buzz, though given the cavernous vastness of the BEXCO Convention Centre and the newly-constructed Busan Film Center, it was sometimes hard to tell.

The actual cinemas were pretty full, with a large number of sessions sold out, and the festival's audience -- as ever, more or less evenly split between old and young -- displayed the same admirable adventurousness, the willingness to engage with works on their own terms, that I'd noticed on previous visits. Even something as intransigent, as superficially "difficult," as Benny Vandendriessche and Dirk Hendrikx's "Drift," enjoyed good attendance and sustained attention. No one walked out; at the end, there was applause and some thoughtful, well-considered questions.

That film, incidentally, proved one of the discoveries of the festival: Based on a series of performance pieces by artist-dancer Hendrikx, it related the final days in the marriage of a man and his terminally-ill wife, who have come to a hotel high in the Carpathians, to prepare for her approaching death. Interspersed with their scenes together were a series of increasingly bizarre tableaux, set months afterward, in which the unnamed protagonist -- played by Hendrikx himself -- subjected himself to certain ritualistic torments: Attempting to walk while carrying a large, flat stone on his upturned face, burying his head in the earth.

It sounds risible in summary, but the film offered a powerful meditation on grief, on how unmoored one can become, physically as well as psychically, with the loss of a beloved, and as such, boasted an extraordinary, accumulative emotive force. And its coda -- a sequence showing Hendrikx and his co-star Lieve Meeussen dancing together, apparently filmed years earlier -- proved devastating. Like Philippe Grandrieux's astonishing "White Epilepsy," the result showed how rich cinema can be when it mines other artistic disciplines for inspiration.

The other big news of the festival was the unexpected arrival of Quentin Tarantino -- apparently to support his buddy Bong Joon-ho, whose "Snowpiecer" had already opened commercially across the country, but which featured in the festival nonetheless, in a cut as-yet unmolested by the none-too-tender ministrations of Harvey Weinstein.

Rumor had it that, having now seen the original, QT would intervene, and tell Harvey to back off -- a scenario which sounded to me rather more hopeful than likely. Nevertheless, his visit inspired almost as much media attention as did the typhoon that almost laid waste to Hyundae Beach earlier this week.

Soggy but undaunted, the festival went on. And unsurprisingly so, since, for all the dire talk of Asian film piracy, Koreans still love going to the cinema, and to enter some of this festival's venues -- the multiplexes atop the Sinsenae and Lotte department stores, for example -- is to revisit a vanished age of moviegoing: huge halls, massive screens, luxurious seats, state-of-the-art projection and sound.

Part of this, I suspect, has to do with social factors. Korean young people, who typically live with their parents until marriage (and occasionally after, as well), typically lack for public spaces in which to be alone together. Thus the cinema, like other communal sites -- the bathhouse, the café, the norebang -- offers a rare opportunity to spend time as a couple. (One might, in fact, argue that the quest for intimacy amidst proximity is the defining quality of life in the modern Asian metropolis.)

But to fill these large, well-appointed spaces also demands a certain kind of cinema. And it's here that the link between the US and the ROK is all but inescapable, since "drama" today seems to be as dirty a word here as in the halls of any Hollywood studio.

Early last decade, while everyone was eagerly hailing the arrival of the New Korean Cinema, there was a small but impressive cadre of grown-up dramas made on the peninsula: Im Sang-soo's "A Good Lawyer’s Wife" (2003), Park Chan-ok's "Jealousy Is my Middle Name" (2002), Jeong Jae-eun's "Take Care of My Cat" (2001). Alas, this strand of filmmaking seems almost entirely extinct today. Instead, you find endless variations on the same handful of genres: spy thrillers (understandable, when you consider what lies across their own northern border), teen romances, broad comedies, lavishly-mounted historical pageants, melodramas. But sober, character-driven illustrations of what it means to live in one of the richest nations in the developed world, a country not only poised between modernity and tradition, but actually divided against itself? These are rare indeed.

And those filmmakers have felt the crunch. With only one subsequent feature to her name, 2005's so-so skate-punk drama "The Aggressives," Jeong Jae-eun has moved into short-form documentary filmmaking, while Park Chan-ok has only completed two films in a decade. Im Sang-soo, once one of the country's most versatile talents, has veered into mass-market "event" movies, with glossy, empty trash like "The Housemaid" and "The Smell of Money." His near-namesake Hong Sang-soo, meanwhile, seems content to churn out the same movie every few months, to ever-more-diminishing effect.

Elsewhere, the news is no better. Never exactly the deepest thinker, Kim Ki-duk is these days more a public provocateur -- a kind of taboo-busting, soju-quaffing thrill-ride -- than any kind of serious artist. Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho are busily -- and deservedly -- becoming international filmmakers. Only Lee Chang-dong has kept the faith, with films like "Secret Sunshine" and "Poetry" evincing the refined intelligence, the acute social observation of that brief early-00s heyday. And even his output was interrupted -- in this case voluntarily, by a two-year stint as Minister of Culture and Tourism under President Roh Moo-hyun.

In the absence of better options, I caught a couple of local duds. Choi Jin-seong's "Steel Cold Winter" was a teen romance-mystery that suffered not only from a way-too-cute boy protagonist -- with his bee-stung lips and gamine 'do, Kim Shi-doo looked like he'd just wandered across from an Epik High shoot -- but also from a rather over-zealous make-up artist; watching, I was continually distracted by the boy's kabuki-like pancake, which frequently threatened to turn him invisible against the snow. For all its pretensions to social commentary (Hey! Outcasts are people too!), the story never rose much about Edward-and-Bella-style fanfic, all long, yearning stares and awkward silences. And snow. Lots of snow.

No more encouraging was "Intruders," from writer-director Noh Young-seok, whose 2008 debut, "Daytime Drinking," announced a talent as resourceful as it was singular. (The film was made independently, on a micro-budget, and Noh also served as cinematographer, editor and composer.) This one, his sophomore effort, opens extremely well, with a set-up a little like the darker flipside to one of those aforementioned Hong San-soo movies (a blocked screenwriter travels to the country, calls up old flame to join him). It proceeds through a nifty series of encounters between the protagonist and some locals -- each comical, yet imbued with the sense of incipient violence which seems, somehow, to characterize most social interactions in South Korea.

But then, disastrously, it begins to take itself seriously: suddenly there are North Korean agents running around, and reversal piles upon reversal, and what was entertaining becomes first ludicrous and then tiresome. In the process, Noh abandons all of the sharp character work, the keen satirical edge, that made his debut so memorable.

Another world premiere, "Nagima," from Kazakh writer-director Zhanna Issabayeva, was a disappointment, a badly outdated flowering of Bressonian impassivity (by way of Omirbayev) from a director who never seemed to know quite where to put her camera. And in its cast of dead-eyed non-pros -- all drawn, reportedly, from local orphanages -- we soon ran up against the limits of technique; unlike the master she was imitating, Isaabayeva could not manage to wring emotion from the rigidly expressionless figures she put onscreen.

Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida," though, was a triumph: immaculately crafted, quietly shattering, its high-contrast B&W cinematography looking, at times, more like charcoal etchings than photographic images. But though set in the early 1960s, in the darkest days of Polish communism, it was in the simplicity of its storytelling that it most recalled the work of forebears like Wajda and Munk, and the native tradition to which Pawlikowski, a Pole long resident in Britain, has returned.

A young nun (the luminous Agata Trzebuchowska), an orphan, discovers she was in fact born Jewish, and accompanies her aunt -- a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, cynical judge known as "Red Wanda" for her zealous persecution of enemies of the State -- to recover the bodies of her parents, murdered by anti-Semites shortly after the end of WWII. Their quest becomes a kind of road movie, as well as a dialogue between faith and reason, and the spiritual and secular worlds between which Anna/Ida, on the verge of taking her vows, is suspended. Effortlessly integrating deeper themes with its surface pleasures (the production design, by Katarzyna Sobanska and Marcel Slawinski, is especially strong), yet remaining as austere and reticent as its young protagonist, it's a tough film to love. But then, as Ida would be the first to admit, it's a pretty tough world, too.

18th Busan International Film Festival

Carlos Aguilar — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 12:30:00 GMT

Showcasing the latest films from across the region, the Busan International Film Festival is undoubtedly one of the most influential film events in Asia. Besides the incredible amount of films from all over the world, highlighting the continent’s most prominent nations in the cinematic landscape (Japan, India, and South Korea itself), it also hosts the Asian Film Market. For it’s 18^th edition taking place October 3^rd to 12 ^th2013, the festival has garnered an astonishing 299 films from 70 different countries, creating with this a fantastic gallery of autochthonous films from up-and-coming directors working in diverse Asian nations, but also infusing the mix with the best World Cinema has had to offer this year.

The festival will open with the Bhutanese film Vara: A Blessing, which is the third feature film by lama-turned-director Khyentse Norbu, and deals with the love affair between a men and woman from different castes. Closing the festival will be Kim Dong-hyun’s The Dinner, a family drama that deals with the characters’ financial issues and interpersonal relationships.

Among several other relevant sections, the festival’s “New Currents” will display 12 films that represent innovative or bold storytelling that explore social issues in non-traditional ways. One of the standouts of this section is the Philippine feature Transit by Hannah Espia about Philippine immigrants working in Israel, which was recently chosen as the country’s official submission for next year’s Academy Awards. Also in this section is the experimental narrative The Story of an Old Woman by Kazakh director Alexey Gorlov, whose feature debut depicts the life of the elderly lead character in a single, unedited,continuous shot.

Honoring the festival’s home country are two section’s that collectively represent the current state of Korean Cinema. The “Panorama” section includes 14 films from some of the most renowned filmmakers in the Asian nation, among them Hong Sang-soo's two latest features Our Sunhi and Nobody’s Daughter Haewon, Ki-duk Kim’s Moebius, and Lee Jang-ho’s first film in 18 years God’s Eye View. On the other side of the spectrum, the “Visions’ section is conformed of 10 films from the fast-growing Korean independent film arena that feature stories from varied genres, from gangster films to comedies.

Other sections include the “Unknown New Wave Central Asian Cinema” which is designed to shine light on forgotten gems from the Central Asian nations, 8 films from Kazakhstan. Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan will be presented at the festival, many of them for the first time in decades as they were considered lost. Lastly, the World Cinema section will bring the best from Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, and many other important markets to the Asian landscape. Blue is the Warmest Color, Fruitvale Station, Heli, and Inside Llewyn Davis are among the outstanding collection of films that will make their debut outside the European and North American circuits.

For for more information on the Festival click HERE

Dispatch From Busan: Highlights (and Lowlights) From 'The Cannes of Asia'

Michael Nordine — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:25:06 GMT

Every movie in every non-press venue at the Busan International Film Festival -- which concluded its 2012 edition last week -- has assigned seating. You don't get to choose your own seat. This tends not to matter a great deal, as relatively few screenings sell out and a plurality of viewers completely ignore their seating assignment, but still: a bit odd, no?

I certainly thought so as I settled in for my first movie just hours after landing in South Korea's second-largest city, which has now hosted the self-proclaimed "Cannes of Asia" for 17 years running. In addition to the holdovers from Berlin, Cannes, and Venice for which I was most excited -- Christian Petzold's "Barbara," Abbas Kiarostami's "Like Someone in Love," and "The Fifth Season," to name but a few -- I naturally made an effort to see at least a smattering of regional movies that aren't likely to arrive on U.S. shores anytime soon.

In most cases my choices were based on relatively little information and I wound up disappointed as often than not. (There's a roulette-like excitement to walking into a festival screening with no prior knowledge of the movie you're about to watch, and this is the potential downside.) The two main offenders were "Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time," a watchable-if-generic box-office king in its native Korea whose name is a fairly strong indication of its storyline, and "An End to Killing," a Mongolian/Chinese almost-epic about Genghis Khan that, were it called generic, would be an insult to off-brand cereal and inexpensive medication.

The most pleasant surprise -- as well as the one which elicited the strongest feeling of actual discovery -- ended up coming from Gabriela Pichler's "Eat Sleep Die," which premiered under-the-radar in Toronto a few months ago. An unfortunately-titled Swedish film telling the Dardenne-like tale of a laid-off factory worker/Muslim immigrant named Raša, the film more than transcends its familiar premise via Nermina Lukač's engrossing performance and a nearly unforgettable final scene. Also of note was "Blancanieves," a silent, black-and-white take on "Snow White." The only shame is that it wasn't released pre-"The Artist": Comparisons between the two are inevitable, and while this is the superior -- not to mention more authentically silent -- film, it's likely to only receive a fraction of the audience.

And what of those festival holdovers? A mixed bag, of course, but one in which the good ("Paradise: Love," "In the Fog") outweighed the bad ("The Last Time I Saw Macao," "Something in the Air"). Matteo Garrone's Grand Prix-winning "Reality" was even better than "Gomorrah," his last Grand Prix-winner; "Lore," which I accidentally watched without subtitles, was visually sumptuous but gave the impression of being otherwise under-realized; Carlos Reygadas' "Post Tenebras Lux" continues to baffle me.

My hopes were highest for Cristian Mungiu's "Beyond the Hills" and, despite a listless midsection, the followup to "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" did turn out to be one of the stronger films I saw in Busan. It isn't without its problems -- the disconnect between the relationship drama at its center and the religious fervor surrounding it is sometimes sillier than it is mystical -- but it's carried along by expert direction and immersive austerity. Best of all, I'm somewhat surprised to say, was Thomas Vinterberg's absorbing, ridiculously well-acted "The Hunt."

The most meta moment, however, had to be watching Hong Sang-soo's "In Another Country." Starring Isabelle Huppert as three different incarnations of a French woman visiting a small Korean village, the film featured close to a dozen seemingly prosaic moments of conversation at which the mostly-Korean audience erupted in laughter. I guess a lot really is lost in translation.

As for non-assigned seating, I attended precisely one press screening: Kim Ki-duk's Golden Lion-winning "Pieta." In truth, I wouldn't have even attended that screening had the two public screenings which preceded it not both sold out -- I was interested in how audiences would react to all the films in Busan, this one in particular.

Kim is often pegged as a misogynist, provocateur, or both; anticipating controversy (and, having only seen a handful of his movies, not possessing a strong opinion on him either way), I wanted to see how many people would walk out. My guess is that a good amount did, but they'd be wrong to: Though enmeshed in ugliness and cruelty for its first hour or so, "Pieta" undergoes a strange transformation in its latter half that sees it redeemed at roughly the same pace as its troubled protagonist. It remains a flawed, problematic picture, but it also provided a thought-provoking start to my final day in its home country.

Seduced by "Choked," Asia's Busan Film Festival Transforms

Doug Jones — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 06:15:12 GMT

For the past sixteen years, the Pusan International Film Festival has often featured fireworks on its opening nights. This year, however, was a little different. The multicolored lights flashing over the heads of audience members were still impressive, but they were electronic, a vast LED light-show that ushered in a year of change for Asia's largest film event, which concludes tonight with the world premiere of Harada Masato's "Chronicle of my Mother." While some changes were largely cosmetic, the festival finally decided to adopt the generally accepted Romanized spelling of its host city and officially became the Busan International Film Festival with a "B"-- others were major.

Since its inception, the festival has been personified, both locally and abroad, by its director, the charismatic Kim Dong-ho. For fifteen years, Kim worked with everyone from international movie stars and industry types to unknown filmmakers and teenage volunteers in his unflagging efforts to promote the festival and Asian cinema. Now, in what appears to be a seamless transition, Kim has passed leadership of the organization to Lee Yong-kwan. One of the founders of the festival, Lee has served in a number of staff roles positions over the years, including senior programmer, deputy director and, for the past three years, co-director alongside Kim. With his calm, soft-spoken demeanor, Lee might not be as lively or omnipresent at parties as his predecessor was, but he'll no doubt be just as busy, especially considering his first year coincides with the opening of the $150 million Busan Cinema Center.

With major construction completed just in time for the festival (supposedly the last bit of scaffolding was removed just a few hours before the crowds arrived for opening night), the brand new Busan Cinema Center boasts two interlocked buildings, nine stories, three indoor theaters, one outdoor theater, a lot of office space and the multicolored, football field-sized LED ceiling that entertained those opening night audiences. Similar in purpose to Toronto's Bell Lightbox but more architecturally ambitious with its futuristic lines, swooping electronic ceiling and vast expanses of open space, the Busan Cinema Center will give the festival a year-round home while forever changing the skyline of Busan's Centum City district. And if a bit of sawdust and plaster still lingered in the air as audiences sat down to watch this year's films, nobody seemed to mind.

Considering that the eight-day festival features over 300 films, it was surprising how quickly the critical conscientious anointed Kim Joong-hyun's "Choked" as one of the strongest films of the festival. By the end of the second day, the Korean film seemed to be on everyone's must-see list. Exploring the tensions between financial and familial responsibilities as they come to bear on an estranged mother and her adult son, "Choked" marks an auspicious debut for Kim, who confidently ratchets up the tension as his cast of characters becomes ever more desperate for emotional debt relief.

"Choked" was one of thirteen films in the New Currents competitive section, and many assumed it was a foregone conclusion that it would be recognized with the top honors. Festival juries are inscrutable beasts though, and when the awards were announced this morning, it was Morteza Farshbaf’s “Mourning” and Loy Arcenas "Niño" that got the nods. "Mourning," the story of a deaf couple driving their nephew through the Iranian countryside in the wake of a family tragedy, was one of a number of interesting Iranian production featured throughout the program, examples of the vibrant independent f community in Iran, one worth supporting as the government there becomes increasingly hostile towards them. The film also won the FIPRESCI Award.

"Niño," however, is a more curious choice for the New Current prize. A family melodrama sporting the overly familiar story of a dying patriarch and the family squabbles that ensue, the Philippine film is decently made, but certainly not representative of anything "new" or "current." In their award statement, the jury likened the film to an "aria in an opera," but for many people it was more like a song you hear, maybe hum along to and then immediately forget once it's over.

Another auspicious debut comes from animator Yeon Sang-ho, whose film "The King of Pigs" walked away with three festival awards. In a film that proved divisive amongst festival-goers, two former friends reunite after 15 years apart. Both men are clearly troubled - one has just killed his wife and begun hallucinating - and things do not get any better as they start walking down a particularly disturbing memory lane. Yeon's animation style of bold lines, harsh character designs and a deliberate flatness proved a stumbling block for many viewers, but those who appreciated the look of the film (or managed to look past it) saw an unflinching exploration of the darkness lurking within the Korean male psyche.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Busan. Image courtesy of BIFF.

Joining the list of Busan's extracurricular activities, which already includes the renamed Asian Project Market (formerly the Pusan Promotional Plan) and the relocated Asian Film Market, was the Busan Cinema Forum. With the heady goal of "enhancing knowledge and support of the film industry and film aesthetics around the world," the Forum was produced in conjunction with Cashiers du Cinema, so it was appropriate that the keynote speech was given by one of Asia's foremost auteurs, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

In an hour-long speech-cum-slide show entitled "Superabundance," Weerasethakul quoted everyone from Yoda to his 79-year-old mother as he nimbly jumped from topic to topic, sharing his thoughts on his early influences, the future of crowd sourcing, video piracy as an alternative mode of distribution, censorship and the proliferation of the digital image. "My nephew is used to being videotaped since he was born - actually since he popped out of his mother's womb - and his parents trust Sony to remember their son for them," Weerasethakul observed. "We ourselves are also walking cameras...We can shoot video on a whim, so we're part of this giant network of surveillance machines, you and I... With cameras in our hands, we are all directors and actors at the same time," he said to the audience members, many of whom, in true Busan style, were recording his speech on their cameras and smart phones.

The 2011 Busan International Film Festival Award Winners

New Currents Award
Winner: Mourning - Morteza Farshbaf (Iran)
Winner: Niño - Loy Arcenas (Philippines)

Flash Forward Award
Winner: La-Bas. A Criminal Education - Guido Lombardi (Italy)

Sonje Award for Short Films
Winner (Asia): Thug Beram - Venkat Amudhan (India)
Special Mention (Asia): DIY Encouragement - Kohei Yoshino (Japan)
Winner (Korea): See You Tomorrow - Lee Woo-ju (Korea)
Special Mention (Korea): Bugging Heaven; Listen to Her - O Hyun-ju (Korea)

BIFF Mecenat Award for Documentaries
Winner : Sea of Butterfly - Park Bae-il (Korea)
Winner : Shoji & Takao - Yoko Ide (Japan)

KNN Movie Award (Audience Award)
Winner: Watch Indian Circus - Mangesh Hadawale (India)

FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Award
Winner: Mourning – Morteza Farshbaf (Iran)

NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award
Winner: The King of Pigs – Yeun Sang Ho (Korea)

Busan Cinephile Award
Winner: The Twin - Gustav Danielsson (Sweden)

Citizen Reviewers’ Award
Blue Pine Tree: Jesus Hospital - Lee Sangcheol and Shin Aga (Korea)
Red Pine Tree: A Fish - Park Hong-Min (Korea)
Yellow: Romance Joe - Lee Kwan (Korea)

DGK Award
Directors Award: The King of Pigs - Yeun Sang Ho (Korea)
Actor: Beautiful Miss Jin - Ha Hyun Kwan (Korea)
Actress: Jesus Hospital - Han Song Hee and Whang Jungmin (Korea)

CGV Movie Collage Award
Winner: The King of Pigs - Yeun Sang Ho (Korea)

[Doug Jones is Associate Director of Programming for Film Independent’s Los Angeles Film festival.]

In Pusan, Fest Guru Kim Heads Out; "Musan," "Night" & "Pure" Take Top Nods

Doug Jones — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 05:16:31 GMT

Midway through this year's Pusan International Film Festival, while accepting his honorary title of Asian Filmmaker of the Year, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang gave voice to the sentiments of many festival attendees. "I am honored, but also truly sad, for Kim Dong-ho is retiring after this festival." Festival Director of South Korea's largest film festival since its inception in 1996, the soft-spoken, seemingly tireless Kim is stepping down after fifteen years at the helm. In Pusan, Kim is his own celebrity, with admirers stopping him for autographs along with the local and international celebs attending his festival. Underscoring Kim's importance -- not just to the festival or even Korean cinema but to Asian cinema at large -- at some point nearly every event at this year's festival, which ends today after nine days of movies, project markets and a record number of premieres, became an impromptu tribute to Kim, beginning with the Opening Night ceremony and the unveiling of a festival trailer featuring an animated Kim zipping through the streets of Bussan on the back of a scooter.

Throughout the week, wherever he went (and, as Pusan regulars know, he goes everywhere) Kim was feted, serenaded, presented with plaques and flowers, and, of course, toasted with countless glasses of soju. Reassuring everyone that the beloved festival director will remain in their hearts and minds even after he no longer has that title, Tsai concluded his remarks by saying, "Mr. Kim will not leave us," a sentiment that Kim himself echoes, albeit in more practical terms.

"I believe I have a responsibility to provide whatever type of advice or help I can. As somebody who established and led the festival for the past fifteen years, I'm not in a position where I can just ignore the future of the festival," Kim explained during a brief respite in his busy schedule. His successor will not be officially named until February, but Kim is convinced the transition will be a smooth one. Pointing to Lee Yong-Kwan role as Co-Festival Director, Kim explained, "We began preparing the festival for my possible retirement four years ago." And what is he preparing for himself? "At the moment, I don't have a particular concrete plan. I might like to interview the master directors from all around the world and capture their thoughts on cinema."

If Kim decides to broaden the scope of his documentary to include promising newcomers, he could begin with the winners of this year's New Currents competition--Yoon Sung-hyun and Park Jung-bum.

Running its narrative on parallel tracks, Bleak Night, Yoon Sung-hyun's award-winning feature debut, traces the decay of three high schoolers' friendship, which ultimately leads to the tragic death of one of them, while also following the dead boy's father as he tries to make sense of it all. Yoon shows remarkable restraint in his storytelling, never revealing details other films would highlight and emerging with a film that finds its power in what's left unsaid.

One of three films at this year's festival that dealt with the plight of North Korean immigrant in South Korea, Park Jung-bum's The Journals of Musan, which also won the festival's FIPRESCI Award, follows a downtrodden defector who simply can't get comfortable in his new country. As played by the director himself, the man tries to find solace in work, in church, even in karaoke, but like his factory-issued North Korean jacket, nothing seems to fit. Tempering his character's at times painfully realized awkwardness with a delicate thread of understated humor, Park directs himself into giving one the festival's most memorable performances.

Another exciting debut was that of Sivaroj Kongsakul from Thailand. Beginning with its arresting opening sequence--18 minutes without a word spoken--Kongsakul's Eternity brings a lyrical, leisurely rhythm to its observance of the blossoming romance between a young man and his bride-to-be. Intimate without ever being obtrusive, Kongsakul allows his film to quietly build an emotion resonance that can only fully be appreciated once the entire film is over.

To appreciate the full spectrum of contemporary Thai cinema, a double feature of the decidedly art house Eternity and Waist Sasanatieng's box office fodder The Red Eagle would be required--just not really recommended. A reboot of a popular franchise from the Sixties, The Red Eagle is an action film about a masked vigilante and his one-man war against an evil secret society. Unfortunately, the real battle seems to be raging within the film itself. The audacious style Sasanatieng displayed in earlier films like Tears of the Black Tiger or Citizen Dog can only be glimpsed sporadically throughout Red Eagle, buried beneath a barrage of generic gun play and hilariously blatant product placement.

Sasanatieng fares much better with Iron Pussy: A Kimchi Affair, his episode of Camellia, the Busan-set, international-produced omnibus film that closes this year's festival. Relocating Thai's top cross-dressing, time travelling government assassin from Bangkok (where she was initially conceived by performance artist Michael Shaowanasai and brought to the big screen by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) to Busan, Iron Pussy is a playfully camp amalgamation of visual gags, musical numbers, and kitschy spy vs. spy maneuverings. Far more subdued is Japanese Yukisada Isao's entry Kamome, in which a cinematographer spends a night wandering the streets with a shoeless Japanese girl, as if in a slightly more mysterious version of Before Sunrise. Marking Jang Joon-hwan's first directorial effort since his acclaimed debut Save the Green Planet, Love for Sale, the final bit, follows its hero as he rages through Busan's love underground, determined to bring the illicit trade in stolen memories--particularly his own of his one true love--to a end. There's more style than substance to Joon-hwan's entry--which worked fine for Sasanatieng, who had his tongue planted firmly in his Iron Pussy cheek--but unfortunately the material here is approached with a seriousness that promises poignancy it can't deliver. Although both Yukisada and Joon-hwan's segments have their strengths, ultimately it's Sasanatieng's that will stay with most viewers for its sheer sense of fun and, of course, for the octopus phone. Oh, did I not mention the octopus phone?

A complete list of winners can be found on the next page.

[Doug Jones is Associate Director of Programming for Film Independent's Los Angeles Film Festival.]

Pusan International Film Festival Award Winners

New Currents Award
Winner: The Journals of Musan – Directed by Park Jung-Bum (Korea)
Winner : Bleak Night. Directed by Yoon Sung-Hyun (Korea)

Flash Forward Award
Winner : Pure. Directed by Lisa Lngseth (Sweden)
Special Mention : Erratum. Directed by Marek Lechki (Poland)

Sonje Award for Short Films
Winner : Broken Night. Directed by Yang Hyojoo (Korea)
Winner : Inhalation. Directed by Edmund Yeo (Malaysia / Japan)
Special Mention: Unfunny Game. Directed by Park Jongchul (Korea)
Special Mention: The Journey. Directed by Yim Kyungdong (Korea)

PIFF Mecenat Award for Documentaries
Winner : Miracle on Jongno Street. Directed by Lee Hyuk-sang (Korea)
Winner : New Castle . Directed by Guo Hengqi (China)

FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Award
Winner : The Journals of Musan. Directed by Park Jung-bum (Korea)

NETPAC (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award
Winner : Dooman River. Directed by Zhang Lu (Korea)

KNN Movie Award (Audience Award)
Winner : My Spectacular Theatre. Directed by Lu Yang (China)

WORLD CINEMA REPORT: Another "Crouching Tiger": Korea Sustains Boom with Blockbusters and Auteurs

Indiewire — Thu, 22 Aug 2002 06:00:00 GMT

WORLD CINEMA REPORT: Another "Crouching Tiger": Korea Sustains Boom with Blockbusters and Auteurs

by Anthony Kaufman

(indieWIRE: 08.22.02) -- Watch out, Hollywood. Add South Korea to a growing list of national cinemas (see France and India) with the right dose of big-budget blockbusters and prolific auteurs to draw in local audiences and stir up international interest. Last year, homegrown works nabbed the top five spots at the country's box office with an estimated 49.1 percent market share, beating out American studio product like "Shrek," "Harry Potter," and "Pearl Harbor." And all over the world, Korean masters like Im Kwon Taek (best director at Cannes 2002 for "Chihwaseon") and new mavericks like Kim Ki-Duk ("The Isle," opening in the U.S. this Friday from Empire Pictures) and Hong Sang-Soo ("Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors," screening this week in the New York Korean Film Festival) have received critical praise and festival accolades.

The first half of 2002 shows the trend continuing: grandmother/son drama "The Way Home," detective thriller "Public Enemy," and sci-fi pic "2009 Lost Memories" are among the top five grossing films. Plus, a staggering four Korean features have been bought for Hollywood remakes (see Why Studio Remakes Don't Suck; U.S. Versions Rebound Foreign Originals); "Flight of the Bee" director Min Boung-hun's "Let's Not Cry" received special jury and FIPRESCI prizes at last month's Karlovy Vary Film Festival; "Peppermint Candy" director Lee Chang-Dong's latest "Oasis" will premiere at Venice next month, and new movies from Kim Ki-Duk ("Bad Guy"), Hong Sang-Soo ("Turning Gate," screening at the New York Film Festival) and controversial "Lies" director Jang Sun-Woo ("Resurrection of the Little Match Girl") all reflect an unrelenting pace.

Referred to more than once on the festival circuit (reductively) as the "fishhook film," Kim Ki-Duk's "The Isle" is much more: a lyrical, beautifully realized meditation on pain, pleasure and devotion, inflected with a subtle dark sense of humor. (Fishhooks enter orifices that will make you squirm, yes, like a fish.) A self-taught filmmaker, Kim began generating attention with his third feature "Birdcage Inn." His 2001 work "Address Unknown" screened at Venice last year, and with "The Isle" finally washing up on these shores, his reputation as a Korean director with international appeal should be solidified.

"Bad Guy," Kim's seventh feature in six years, has already opened in Korea. The story, about a pimp who tries to turn a college girl into a prostitute, has become the writer-director's most successful work to date. Darcy Paquet, a Korean correspondent for Screen International, credits the film's domestic success to several factors, including increased marketing, Kim's own growing status, and the presence of actor Jo Je-hyun, a rising member of the nation's flourishing star system. Kim is already at work on his next film, "The Shoreline," which will star bona-fide Korean celebrity Jang Dong-Gun ("Friend," "2009 Lost Memories") and will likely boost the box-office potential for the once-marginalized filmmaker. (In Korea, it's worth noting action stars Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jackie Chan have all been supplanted by locals like Jang, Han Suk-Kyu, Lee Jung Jae, and Jung Woo-Sung.)

The recent phenomenon of the Korean blockbuster -- and all the money and fervor it's generated -- has contributed to an upswing for films, both big and small. "It can be said that the appearance of low-budget art films is a side effect of the Korean hit movies and the concentration of capital in the film industry," says Noh Kwang Woo, a correspondent for the Korean Film Commission and a coordinator of this year's New York Korean Film Festival. Further proof of the run-off can be found in the building of a new sound studio (to be the nation's largest) in the city of Busan, and the Korean Film Commission's undertaking of a new digital fiction feature fund, contributing up to $25,000 to independent DV narratives.

Some skeptics wonder how long Korea's boom can last. A recent article in Variety postulated that soaring budgets (U.S. $5-$8.5 million) were not sustainable, given the relatively small Korean movie-going population and the limited market for such films overseas. But Noh describes a situation in which increased international co-productions will sustain growth. While inaugural blockbusters "Shiri" and "Joint Security Area" may have been financed by single domestic companies, Noh contends that "co-production and co-financing may be more dominant." Noh adds that "though the rate of profit of big budget films is not as high as expected, there still will be big hit movies such as 'Friend' and 'My Sassy Girl,' which are produced with relatively lower budgets."

But "Friend," Kwak Kyung-taek's top-grossing epic tale of four friends-turned-gangsters, screening as part of the New York Korean Film Festival, may aspire to the scope and style of a Scorsese, it still lacks the emotion and pull of its American equivalent. Other genre efforts and U.S. premieres at the fest, such as "Guns and Talks" and "No Blood, No Tears," are sure to offer some thrills, but little else. In fact, judging from the programming