11th Pusan International Film Festival Begins Today

An international competition called New Currents will select a winner from among ten candidates, the recipient to receive US $30,000. The award is to recognize promising new talent. Presiding over the jury will be Hungarian filmmaker Istvan Szabo. Others on the jury include director Bruno Dumont, producer Daniel Yu, Iranian director Abolfzi Jalili and Korean actress Moon So-ri.

A section entitled Korean Cinema Today and divided into three headings, will feature the works of domestic filmmakers. Panorama will showcase popular and artistic successes of the year (The Host, City of Violence, A Dirty Carnival, Family Ties, King and the Clown, Woman on the Beach); Vision will highlight innovative new directors (Shin Dong-il’s My Friend and his Wife, Noh Dong-seok’s Boys of Tomorrow); and Special Premiere will present the world premieres of Park Ki-hyung’s Gangster High and Im Sang-soo’s uncut The President’s Last Bang.

The Korean Cinema Retrospective will enable festival-goers to see seven films produced under Japanese colonial rule. Viewers will also have the opportunity to see Shin Sang-ok’s long lost Bound By Chastity Rule (1961), discovered two years ago in the Chinese Taipei Film Archive.

At PIFF’s Asian Film Academy, young filmmakers will have the opportunity to pick up pointers from veteran directors Im Kwon-taek, Park Ki-yong, Bae Chang-ho and Darezhan Omirbayev, as well as from Japanese cinematographer Takama Kenji.

Andy Lau has been nominated to receive the Asian Filmmaker of the Year Award. Istvan Szabo and Tsai Ming-liang will give Master Classes.

The World Cinema section will present 52 films from around the world, including Aki Kaurismaki’s Lights in the Dusk, Bruno Dumont’s Flanders, Tony Gatlif’s Transylvania, Lars Von Trier’s The Boss of it All, and Fyodor Bondarchuk’s 9th Company.

Midnight Passion will offer four evenings of darkly entertaining films from various genres. Contemporary French Auteur will feature 13 works by French filmmakers, including Jean-luc Godard and Patrice Leconte.

There will be a presentation on Chinese Queer Films, with guest speakers Tony Rayns and Zien Cui, and a discussion group focusing on documentaries about North Korea, hosted by British filmmaker Daniel Gordon.

Darcy Paquet over at koreanfilm.org recommends three films that will be shown at the festival: Lee Yoon-ki’s (This Charming Girl) Ad Lib Night, based on a Japanese novel about a woman who agrees to stand-in as the daughter of a dying man on his deathbed; Min Boung-hun’s Pruning the Grapevine, about a man studying for the Catholic priesthood; and People Crossing the River, a documentary looking at Japanese-Korean relations as seen through the eyes of four very different individuals.

Source: KOFIC, koreanfilm.org, The Korea Times