Udine. It's a wrap.

At the closing ceremony of the Udine Far East Film Festival on April 29, the audience awards were given to the ten most popular films. As anticipated, the South Korean film Welcome to Dongmakgol, a story about soldiers from the Korean War who chance upon a peaceful community in the mountains and are then transformed by their zest for life, was honored as most popular film of the festival. Approximately 4,000 spectators voted for the films. The complete list, the audience top ten:

• Welcome to Dongmakgol (Park Gwang-hyun, South Korea 2005).
• Always: Sunset on Third Street (Yamazaki Takashi, Japan 2005).
• Linda Linda Linda (Yamashita Nobuhiro, Japan 2005).
• Loach Is Fish Too (Yang Yazhou, China 2005).
• Nana (Otani Kentaro, Japan 2005).
• You Are My Sunshine (Park Jin-pyo, South Korea 2005).
• You and Me (Ma Liwen, China 2005).
• When the Show Tent Came to My Town (Fukagawa Yoshihiro, Japan 2005).
• Hello Yasothorn (Petchthai Wongkamlao, Thailand 2005).
• See You After School (Lee Seok-Hoon, South Korea 2005).

The Udine festival proves time after time to be a well-run, laid-back pageant. Members of the press are able to interview the visiting directors and press coordinator Ippolita Nigris Cosattini makes sure the process runs smoothly. The selection committee chooses films that do not disappoint, with something for every taste: entertainment, art house, and groundbreaking non-linear cinema. Behind the section are film experts who live in Asia, such as Mark Schilling, based in Japan, and Jessica Zafra, who lives in Manila.

The coordination body of the festival is Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche (CEC), headed by president Sabrina Baracetti, festival coordinator Thomas Bertacche and hospitality coordinators Francesco Novella and Valentina Cordelli. Acquiring good Asian films is the aim of the CEC; they explained how this year they had to buy the rights to show three films at the festival and were actually prevented for the first time from other distributors from screening films at Udine. One CEC ambition is to spotlight the films that get "caught in the crosshairs" of the larger festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice. The CEC would also like to have a stronger relationship with the Venice International Film Festival and double the number of Asian films available to the Venice Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region, which has a rich infrastructure of festivals, universities and libraries. Venice Film Festival director Marco Müller, who is a European expert in Chinese literature, is in agreement and attended the festival.

The Udinese audience was delighted by the Japanese mockumentary Ski Jumping Pairs: Road to Torino, screened in the final days of the festival. A mix of digital film and archival footage, it tells the story of the development of "Ski Pairing," an Olympic event developed by quantum physicist Professor Harana. Experts called on for professional input include Dr Norman Bates of Massachusetts University. The film serves to deconstruct the running commentary by sports journalists during Olympics events and we certainly had our share of that with extensive coverage this winter. Swedish National Television ran out of money because of it all, and couldn't afford to broadcast the Academy Awards this year.

Also worthy of mention is the festival trailer directed by Lorenzo Bianchini, with art direction by Alex Nazzi, showing a martial artist brandishing a sword with a shadow warrior - a woman who removes her hood after dueling with her worthy opponent.

Posted by dwhudson at April 30, 2006 2:52 PM