Udine Dispatch. 7.

From Kong Soo-chang's war/horror genre mélange R-Point to Shin Jung-won's comedy/horror genre mash To Catch a Virgin Ghost. A gangster breaks off from his gang and steals already stolen jewels. An accident places him at the mercy of a farming community. A silly turn of events transpires and he ends up unconscious, with one of the diamonds up his nose. The farmers conspire to take advantage of this opportunity, but unbeknownst to them, the gang is on their way to retrieve what was wrongfully theirs.

These gangsters soon find out that all is not as it seems in this farming community, signaled by the presence of a "virgin ghost" (hence the English title; the Korean title of the film translates roughly as "The Town Where Time Is Lost - 2 Kilometers," as in a road sign pointing to said town.) I, and the Italian crowd around me, found this film funny and scary enough to feel this sunny morning screening was well spent. One of the more humorous, and endearing, moments is when the main gangster (Im Chang-jung) sits down to have a chat with our virgin ghost (Im Eun-gyung). Not a perfect film, but just enough mixture of both genres to satisfy nearly two million Korean viewers in the summer of 2004.

Mr. Suave, a film I wrote about in my second dispatch, also did quite well with its home country's audience and with this Udine crowd. Although director Joyce Bernal said she didn't like Mr. Suave and I found the film too ridiculous to enjoy for long, the crowd at Udine rated it very highly, making it one of the more popular films early on. On Thursday, there was a forum for the two Filipino directors at the festival, Bernal and Feng Shui director Chito S. Roño (whose horror film I did not see), to talk about their films and the state of Filipino cinema. The state is not that great. Particularly disheartening, noted by Roño, is the fact that, during the festival, the film processing company, LVN, closed up shop. There are two processing companies still remaining, but all on the panel (which included the curator of the Filipino films, Roger Garcia) agreed that they could not approach the quality of LVN. Roño expounded on the further problems facing Filipino cinema, saying that TV, coupled with current economic conditions, is a major source of their troubles. Stars receive too much exposure on TV and people will forgo seeing a star in a film at extra cost when they can simply watch them on a soap later that evening for free.

One of the questions asked of all the attendees this year was about censorship in their respective countries. Whereas Roño said he has yet to come across much censorship, Bernal shared that she had experienced a lot of censorship of her "sexy movies", or sex comedies. She would often be required to remove scenes or have major dialogue changed.

In the San Francisco Bay area, many Filipino-Americans artists are responsible for making the city such an exciting cultural space. The San Francisco hip hop scene is quite influenced by such artists. Not that familiar with Filipino cinema, I was curious if there has been much involvement with the diaspora since there are so many talented individuals with which to collaborate. Roño said that there have been some attempts, but for the most part, the productions haven't been fruitful.

Following up on this question, Roland Domenig, an Austrian specialist on Japanese Cinema who also does subtitling in German for Japanese films such as Takeshi Kitano's Dolls, asked for the directors' comments about the possibilities for a Pan-Asian cinema aesthetic. This was a very interesting question, considering Erik Matti's comments in his essay that was part of this year's program.

Matti's film Pa-Siyam was screening this year but he was not in attendance. When he attended Udine two years ago, he said, "Looking at the Korean or Chinese movies makes me jealous of their work. Their movies are true to their cultures, but with a very strong universal theme that holds their stories." Realizing what Filipino films were lacking, he exclaimed to himself, "Shit, I have to do something fresh and universal, too!" Moreover, as I mentioned before, Joyce Bernal was quite affected by the Korean film A Family (Lee Jung-chul, 2004). Plus, she had said she greatly enjoyed Park Chul-soo's Green Chair. So it appears that we may eventually see the effects, thematically and aesthetically, across Asia of this yearly festival at Udine which brings all these Far East Asian directors together who might not normally network with each other. As for working collaboratively with other artists across Asia, Roño didn't see this happening with Filipino film presently. However, films at this festival, such as Pang Ho-cheung's AV, show that Pan-Asian production possibilities are there.

I finished off the festival with Kamikaze Girls (Nakashima Tetsuya, 2004) and Flying Boys (Byun Young-joo, 2004). Kamikaze Girls was wonderfully stylish and, in spite of the tangential trajectories of the plot, Nakashima always seemed to bring us back to this strange place on earth. Based on a novel by Novala Takemote, Momoko (Fukada Kyoko) is a girl immersed in baby doll fashions and Rococo stylings who finds herself cut off from her beloved fashion center, Daikanyama in Tokyo, when her father is forced to move to a Japanese farming town. She meets a Japanese girl-gangster named Ichigo (Tsuchiya Anna) who drives a seriously souped-up scooter and much of the plot revolves around Momoko fighting off this friendship - not because Ichigo is a gangster, but because Momoko values her loner status. The film wonderfully investigates the meaning behind the Japanese fashion alignments that befuddle many Westerners. This is all done while refusing to fetishize the girls and while challenging assumptions about group-think amongst Asian cultures. This is the type of film that American distributors would stay away from because it's not what they would expect from a Japanese film, but with the right marketing, I don't see why it wouldn't do well. It did so well, in fact, with the Udine crowd that it was the second highest vote-magnet for the Audience Award, finishing behind Gu Changwei's Peacock.

Flying Boys, however, did not fly at Udine, possibly due to the randomness of the plot at times. The story follows Min-jae (Korean pop star Yun Gye-sang making his film debut) during his final year of high school, a very stressful time for all Korean youths as they prepare to take their college entrance exams. Min-jae is quite implausibly extorted into taking ballet lessons. He stays on when he discovers his crush, Su-jin (Kim Min-jeong), has also been forced to take the class. In Su-jin's case, her mother imposes the classes upon her due to her anxieties about Su-jin's sexuality. The film offers enough interesting takes on gender roles and sexuality - plus a genre-defying scene during the ballet performance - that I found it enjoyable. But that's just peculiar to my own interests in South Korean films. I realize that the film failed for the most part to create a sustainable, entertaining story.

That was my last film at Udine; since my flight home was in the early afternoon, so I only had time for interviews in the morning. The festival was a successful one for me again, primarily due to my reporting here at GreenCine and interviewing the three South Korean directors present. Udine provides a unique space even amongst the world's many Asian film festivals since it insists on highlighting much of what has been popular or marketed for mainstream audiences. Because of this focus, Udine will often bring directors who have never been invited to festivals before, such as Joyce Bernal this year and Mo Ji-eun (A Perfect Match, 2002) from South Korea two years ago, providing these directors with the experience of judging responses to their films from audiences outside their own countries. Udine's audience seems to be particularly geared to appreciate a wide variety of films, as noted by the films that fell into their top ten, from serious films (Xu Jinglei's Letters from an Unknown Woman and the Audience Award-winner Peacock) to comedies (Kamikaze Girls), actioners (Ryu Seung-wai's Arahan) and melodramas (A Family). Although I am concerned about how big the festival is becoming (as demonstrated by how limited interviewing times are now; no more than 15-20 minutes), I am still able to locate a seat easy enough, if not one from the best viewing angle. But this only underscores the different perspectives Udine throws me into as a town off the beaten tourist track and a festival outside of highbrow demands.

Posted by dwhudson at May 2, 2005 1:43 PM