Pusan. Wrap.

This year's Pusan International Film Festival was bigger than its 11 predecessors - with 274 films from 64 countries - while still maintaining its pre-eminence among festivals in promoting, discovering and rediscovering Asian films. Bigger does not necessarily mean better, and there was some criticism in the local press (and in Variety) about the choices and organization - there were delays, last-minute cancellations and a shortage of stars and directors. Apparently, Ennio Morricone complained about the way he was treated on stage at the opening rain-sodden ceremony. (The courteous festival director Kim Dong-Ho even made a public apology for some of the mishaps.) All this passed me by as I was holed up in the Megabox multiplex where most of the films were shown.

The reason one goes to Pusan is to feast on Asian movies (and Korean food, for that matter). The New Currents competition section featured 11 of new first or second Asian features, of which at least five are worth looking out for, not a bad average: Flower in the Pocket (Malaysia), Tribe (Philippines), Wonderful Town (Thailand), The Red Awn (China) and Life Track (China-Korea), my own particular favorite, which consisted of haunting silent long takes, observing the strange relationship between an armless man and a deaf-mute girl.

The Korean Cinema Today section was less good than previous years, prompting comments that the local industry was in decline. Nevertheless, it could still boast Lee Chang-Dong's powerfully impressive Secret Sunshine, Kim Ki-Duk's Breath and Im Kwon-Taek's Beyond The Years.

However, the most fascinating and rarest part of the festival was the Korean Cinema Retrospective, which included the earliest extant Korean film, Sweet Dream (1936), overly melodramatic but interesting in that it questioned the traditional model of a woman during the times when fidelity and maternity was considered as a virtue in Korea and in Korean films. The heroine runs away from home, abandoning her husband and daughter for money and and the pursuit of pleasure. Above all, I discovered a little masterpiece, Yoon Yong-gyu's Hometown in My Heart (1949), which tells of a 11-year-old monk, yearning to leave the temple for the big city to find his mother.

The festival also gave audiences, who must be the best-behaved on earth - they even eat popcorn silently - to (re)aquaint themselves with eight films by Edward Yang, who died in June. There were also packed master classes given by Volker Schlöndorff, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Claude Lelouch. My only complaint was that the hundreds of willing, ubiquitous young volunteers only knew about their specific tasks so that if you asked any of them a question for which they were not programmed, they would get into quite a spin, consulting each other earnestly, and then coming up with no answer.

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2007 7:29 AM