Fifteen years of Pusan International Film Festival2010-03-18
Fifteen years of Pusan International Film Festival
Pusan Film Festival director, Kim Dong Ho
In cooperation with the Pusan International Film Festival, one of the largest and most influential festivals in Asia, OFF PLUS CAMERA will be featuring a special program devoted to films that have won acclaim in Pusan over the years. These films have received numerous awards not only in Kim Dong Ho’s Pusan festival, but worldwide. Portraying the rich diversity of Asian culture, these productions prove that Asian cinema is still surprising both audiences and critics with its fresh look and the sensitivity of its filmmakers.
The OFF CAMERA PLUS program will feature ten films, including Yang Ik-Joon’s “Breathless”, which is sure to please lovers of crime stories. The everyday life of the film’s criminal anti-hero, Sang Hoon, is full of street fights, erasing debts, and incidental skirmishes. But everything changes when he meets a high school girl named Yean Hae, who threatens to report him for assault if he…doesn’t call her. Sang’s life becomes even more complicated when Yean Hae’s brother knocks on his door and wants to be introduced into the criminal underworld.
A shot from “The Land of Scarecrows”
Roh Gyeong-tae’s “The Land of Scarecrows” tells the story of three misfits on the fringes of society. The characters live in a polluted wasteland watched over by the titular scarecrows, and nearby lives Ji-young, a female artist who wants a sex change. Taping down her chest and donning a man’s suit, she visits the Philippines and returns with the young and naive Rain, who discovers too late she has married into duplicity. Meanwhile a young boy, Loi-Tan, is fired from his dishwashing job. As he believes he is a Filipino who was adopted by Koreans, Loi-Tan’s and Ji-young’s stories eventually intertwine.
Sohn Young Sung’s film “The Pit and the Pendulum” begins with two men finding an unconscious girl in the woods. As they tell this story to their friends, a multi-threaded narrative develops that centers on a missing friend, Sang-tae. Mysterious characters emerge such as Eunyoung, who helps fill in some gaps of their memories, and the plot thickens with fantasies about love, crime, punishment, and death. As the characters’ retrospection digs deeper into the past, we are left wondering whether it’s possible to discover any grain of truth in a narrative.
A shot from "I'm in Trouble!"
Sang-min So’s “I’m in Trouble!” is a warm story in which the protagonist, Kim Seon-woo, is a third rate poet always apologizing for something. After being dumped, Kim decides to try to win back his girlfriend Yu-na, but quickly becomes entangled with another woman. The result is a smartly written film portraying relationship rollercoasters played against the backdrop of wintry South Korea.
Roundng out this program will be Marzieh Makhmalbaf’s “The Day I Became a Woman”, Weng Sho-Ming’s “Fujian Blue”, Shawkat Amin Korki’s “Kick off”, Masahide Ichii’s “Naked of Defenses”, Hyungsook Hong’s “The Border City 2”, and Kansheng Lee’s “The Missing”. And to add to the celebratory nature of this program, director of the Pusan Film Festival Kim Dong Ho and his main cinematic programmer will be guests of OFF PLUS CAMERA, together with two of the directors noted above, Roh Gyeong-tae (“The Land of Scarecrows”) and Sohn Young-Sung (“The Pit and the Pendulum”).
