BIFF 2012: National Security (남영동1985, Namyeong-dong 1985) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

Corruption, injustice and terror have always been a sad reality of politics. Over the years, many filmmakers have gone to great lengths (sometimes even putting their lives in peril) in a bid to give a voice to the victims of political malfeasance and to shed light on the frequently covered-up truths within the halls of power. Notable examples include Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969). Among the pantheon of political works it is true that those that endure are the ones that shock, works that can elicit an audible gasp from audience members. However, a filmmaker must be careful not to go too far and should also pay due consideration to narrative and filmic requirements when presenting a politically charged narrative on screen.

Chung Ji-young made a big comeback following a 13-year absence this time last year when Unbowed debuted at the 16^th edition of the Busan Film Festival. Hot on its heels and proving that it wasn’t a fluke, he has returned with a searing indictment of the brutal Chun Doo-hwan administration that terrorized Korea for the better part of the 1980s.

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BIFF 2012: Closing Press Conference - Awards and What's in Store for 2013

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

The 17th Busan International Film Festival just held its Closing press conference at which the award winners of the event were announced. Festival director Lee Yong-Kwan was in attendance along with the following Jury members: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio; David Gilmour (New Currents Jury); Arturo Ripstein (Flash Forward Head Jury), Mun Jeong-hyun (BIFF Mecenat Jury); Min Yong Keun (Sonje Jury); Melis Behlil (FIPRECI Jury); and Beck Una (NETPAC Jury).

Though not really a competition festival, there are nevertheless many sponsored, audience and press association awards handed out at the festival in addition to BIFF's own short and documentary prizes. However, the most significant prizes are the New Currents and Flashforward awards which are given to the best first or second feature from Asian and non-Asian filmmakers respectively. Those went to 36 and Kayan for the former and Flower Buds for the latter.

36, from Thailand, also picked up the FIPRESCI prize but the big winner at this year's Busan Film Festival was O Muel's Jeju Island massacre pic Jiseul which walked away with four awards, including the CGV Movie Collage Award, the DGK Awards for Best Director (shared with Russian Novel's Shin Young-shick) and the NETPAC Jury Award. Shin Su-won's Pluto, Chung Ji-young's National Security and Lee Dongku's Fatal, three of the most hyped films of the fest, were left empty-handed but again, as this is not a big competition festival, this shouldn't really hurt their prospects.

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WKR: Busan Showcases New Korean Films, The Thieves Opens Stateside (10/06-10/12, 2012)

A raft of Busan reviews as the festival is in full swing! The Thieves also gets a few big broadsheet writeups in the US after opening there on limited release.

UPCOMING FILMS

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BIFF 2012: Pluto (명왕성, Myeongwangsong) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

Film festivals can be a great place to catch up with big films from established luminaries of world cinema but for the ardent cinephile, the most exciting thing is to make a fresh discovery. With patience and some discerning selecting, you will almost always come away with a few pleasant surprises but, while it is wonderful to stumble upon an accomplished debut or sophomore films from emerging talents in the field, every so often you will see something that gives you a special feeling. It is an unmistakable sense of being part of something new and exciting, in the presence of an artist with raw talent, effortless ability and an intuitive understanding of film. These spine-tingling moments don’t happen at every festival but when they do it makes all the searching worthwhile.

Shin Su-won’s second feature Pluto gave me this feeling. However, before singing too much of its praises, I should say that it is a flawed work. More than the film itself, it is the potential of the director that gave me goosebumps. Without a doubt, Shin is about to be a major player in Korean cinema and could well become a force on the international scene before long.

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BIFF 2012: Fatal (가시꽃) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

Fragile and ephemeral, life is a series of moments, of complicated and random connections that constitute the fabric of our character. Each decision we make affects our path irrevocably: our actions may not always be consequential but they are nonetheless inerasable. Like a thin sheet of glass, our lives can shatter in an instant. The briefest moment can reveal our brittle fragility.

Fatal, a New Currents section debut feature from Lee Donku, begins with a life-altering moment for five people. A young woman has been drugged and raped by a gang of high school students, though one of them is an unwilling participant bullied into performing an act that will torment him for the rest of his life. 10 years later, this now 28-year-old man works for a low-rent clothes manufacturer. An encounter with a Christian group of missionaries on the street prompts him to seek some kind of salvation through religion but when he joins the group he discovers that one of his new colleagues is the woman that he and his friends raped a decade prior.

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KCN: BIFF Opens, Korean Film Fests Galore, Pieta to Play US (10/04-10/10, 2012)

The 17th Busan International Film Festival is in full swing while other Korean film fests get ready to unspool their programs and Pieta acquires US distribution.

KOREAN CINEMA NEWS

Discuss the Future of Asian Film
Asian Film Policy Forum 2012, Asia’s only film policy where various Asian countries get together to discuss film policies and aim at development of Asian film industry through improvement of systems, and the 12th Busan International Film Commission and Film Industry Expo, where information about location shooting of each country and up-to-date video technology are available, will be held at Bexco Haeundae in Busan from October 8th to 11th. (KoBiz, October 9, 2012)

Drafthouse Acquires Kim Ki-Duk’s Pieta
The distribution unit of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema has picked up all North American rights to the 2012 Golden Lion winning film, it was announced. The first Korean movie to ever win the top prize at the Venice International Film Festival, Pietà profiles the relationship between a loan shark and the woman who claims to be his long-lost mother. (Deadline, October 9, 2012)

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BIFF 2012: Azooma (공정사회, Gongjeongsahwi) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

When exploring Korean cinema, you can’t go very far without bumping into a revenge thriller. Park Chan-wook’s ‘Vengeance’ trilogy and Kim Jee-woon’s A Bittersweet Life (2005) are just a few of the more high profile examples. However, of late, this sub-genre has become increasingly popular among independent filmmakers looking to make their mark in the industry. The format seems to supersede horror, sci-fi and other genres as the low-budget debut of choice. The results, however, have been very mixed.

From a narrative standpoint, revenge flicks are rather easy to construct though putting together one that stands out becomes a more complicated task. Azooma, a new offering featuring a female protagonist, doesn’t take great pains to present us with an original story. Instead, it experiments with structure by cutting up a very standard revenge plot and rearranging it. A potentially interesting idea, the execution is sadly undermined by the underdeveloped story, which no matter what way it is sequenced, is bereft of any surprises. Any attempt to feed us new information through a fractured chronology falls flat, as we can already assume it all ahead of its revelation.

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BIFF 2012: Park Chul-soo's B·E·D (2012)

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

A small and sensual chamber piece, Park Chul-soo’s new feature B·E·D (his 27^th) brings to mind Green Chair (2005), his most significant work of the last decade. However, whereas that erotic film was a fascinating study of an unconventional relationship, Park’s new film can’t seem to move beyond its bedroom antics. Granted, as intimated by the title, a bed is the chief component of the film: It is the principal location and also serves as a heavy metaphor for a man’s lifelong obsession with sex, and, by extension, all men’s carnal fixation.

Based on a short story by Kwon Ji-ye of the same name, B·E·D features a man, presented to us as ‘B’, whose life ‘begins on the bed and ends on the bed’. He has an affair with married woman ‘E’ and later, after she breaks up with him, he marries ‘D’, a single mother and career woman.

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KBO: Masquerade Still Top After Enormous Holiday Week (10/05-10/07, 2012)

Masquerade Still Top After Enormous Holiday Week

	Title	Release Date	Market Share	Weekend	Total	Screens
1	Masquerade	9/13/12	48.00%	849,999	8,220,479	867
2	Taken 2 (us)	9/27/12	16.20%	271,598	2,094,497	507
3	Ghost Sweepers	10/3/12	14.80%	264,961	617,456	479
4	Brave (us)	9/27/12	10.40%	188,398	963,115	478
5	Spy	9/20/12	4.10%	73,413	1,255,749	296
6	Ted (us)	9/27/12	3.00%	49,642	217,239	204
7	Wolf Children (jp)	9/13/12	1.30%	24,286	297,537	124
8	Tad the Lost Explorer (us)	9/20/12	0.50%	10,432	202,045	96
9	Take This Waltz (ca)	9/27/12	0.40%	6,291	19,412	22
10	13 (us)	10/3/12	0.30%	5,760	8,670	108

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BIFF 2012: Behind the Camera (뒷담화, 감독이 미쳤어요, Dwitdamhwa, Gamdokyi Micheotseoyo) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

E J-yong’s new feature Behind the Camera is a follow-up to his popular mockumentary Actresses (2009), which featured famous stars playing themselves as they took part in a Vogue shoot. That film poked fun at Korea’s entertainment industry and its willing participants were not scared to send themselves up on screen. Many of the same stars return here and are joined by numerous others, but this time E takes his game one step further as he includes himself as the main protagonist.

The conceit is simple: E J-yong is making a short film but there’s a catch, he’s directing it from Los Angeles via Skype. Things get more complicated as the film he is shooting concerns a filmmaker directing a film from overseas via skype.

There’s really no better word to describe this film than ‘meta’, a term that frequently made me cast my eyes up to the heavens back in my film studies days. Behind the Camera features a narrative that is consciously seeking to replicate itself. However, while the A plotline (featuring E as the director) is presented as a documentary it is almost impossible to trust the filmmaker. His intentions are very playful and most of the protagonists in the film don’t trust him, so why should we? Fact and fiction become blurred to the point where we are prompted to ask ourselves what we find acceptable as a narrative. E’s point (if he is indeed trying to make any) may be that very little justification is required when seeking to tell a story.

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BIFF 2012: Mai Ratima (마이 라티마) 2012

Part of MKC's coverage of the 17th Busan International Film Festival.

Debut features arrive with a weight of expectation but especially if they come from a major thespian making his first foray behind the camera. Yoo Ji-tae is one of Korea’s most well-known actors, he is a celebrity whose marriage last December was one of 2011’s top entertainment stories. To western audiences he will forever be known as the ageless and dapper antagonist from Oldboy (2003) but he has also impressed in dozens of other features throughout his 15-year career. A handsome and very tall performer, Yoo is perhaps a surprising directorial candidate, especially as few Korean performers transition into that role (the boundaries between Korean film industry professions are starker than Hollywood’s more fluid models). However, Yoo has steadily been earning credibility for himself as a short filmmaker over the past few years.

Mai Ratima, which takes its name from its Thai protagonist, is a film that takes a look at the fate of low-class immigrants in Korea. Hard-hitting and at times whimsical, it is a compelling feature that is thoughtfully constructed and deftly executed if overlong and a little too on-the-nose with its social agenda. Most impressive is Yoo’s engaging mise-en-scene. Saturated in heady hues, beautifully lensed and exquisitely edited, Mai Ratima feels like it is the product of a much more experienced hand, certainly not a rookie offering from a paparazzi magnet.

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WKR: Busan Reviews Pour In (09/29-10/05, 2012)

Little late in posting this as I got caught in covering my first Busan Film Fest, starting my new job at the Korean Film Council and moving into a new apartment! That said, plenty of great content from BIFF and will have caught up on all of the Weekly Korean Review updates by weekend's end!

Thanks for your patience!

UPCOMING FILMS

Fire in Hell

(Next Projection, October 1, 2012)

Mai Ratima

(Screen Daily, October 5, 2012)

National Security

(The Hollywood Reporter, October 4, 2012)

Sleepless Night

(Variety, October 29, 2012)

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