Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival 2002 by Russell Edwards
Part 3: Korean film panels and retrospectives at PiFan 2002 For the curious there was also a retrospective of Korean films with a focus on literary adaptations. Unfortunately all of these films from 1957 to 1987 remained unsubtitled. As a result the subtleties and nuances of Don't Walk But Run were a little beyond me. However die-hard film buffs have been known to watch shadow pictures on the wall in a pinch and most of the general gist of this buddy movie from 1976 was comprehensible and frequently funny. By coincidence it also had some moments of pathos reminiscent of Scarecrow the Al Pacino and Gene Hackman film directed by festival guest Jerry Schatzberg. Only the ending bamboozled me, but a quick word to one of the 200-strong army of volunteers got the finale explained to me. Regardless of that final confusion, Don't Walk But Run gave a snapshot of Korean film and society in pre-democratised Korea with its story of two aimless drifters who bounce from town to town trying to pick up women and drinking. A clear indication that whatever the dictatorship was doing before the 1988 Olympics they may not have been going to the movies very often. Korean cinema has been making some big inroads in the last decade but so far nothing has translated into box office internationally. So it was that the seminar (aka Megatalk) on Hollywood remakes featuring speakers Roy Lee and Chris Yoo was very well-attended. Both Korean Americans, who can't really speak Korean, Lee is the producer responsible for the soon to arrive blitz of remakes of Japanese and Korean films.
This one time lawyer and subsequent reader for Universal, was watching Ring - incredibly his first viewing of a Japanese film - on tape and not so incredibly in between being scared out of his wits, heard the cash registers ringing. Halfway through he popped out the tape and took to a friend's house to watch it. Throw in the little detail that the friend is a VP at Dreamworks and a deal for a remake was born. Also in Roy's sights is Il Mare, My Sassy Girl, My Wife Is a Gangster, The Eye and Dark Water, the impressive follow-up of Ring by Nakata which also played at the Puchon fest.	Ring
When questioned about film-makers who take the money, but complain about the quality of remakes and fans who also complain, Roy decried them all as being a bunch of crybabies who don't understand about the film industry. He added that he receives a lot of hate mail from said crybabies, and he doesn't really care what people think. Regardless the trailer for the English-language version of Ring does kick arse (even if the film may not) and is sure to suck in the uninitiated and will do extra biz in Australia because of the Naomi Watts connection. Chris Yoo had been initiated into Korean film at the Pusan film fest a couple of years ago where she saw The Quiet Family (shown at Sydney's Asia Pacific Film Festival and occasionally on SBS). Her American version is currently in pre-production and is taking a backseat to her directing debut which happens to be a Korean language film. Since by her own admission, her Korean "sucks", it could be interesting to see how her American influenced her debut feature entitled 271 may turn out to be.
Not all audience members at the megatalk were convinced that remakes were a good thing for the local Asian industries, it was acknowledged that remakes have always been a problem from silent films onwards there was a general consensus that Hollywood is a generally lazy place. However Lee Hyun-seung the director of Il Mare who happened to be present kept quiet as you would if your film was in line to be adapted by Stephen Spielberg.	Il Mare
The other seminar that was of major interest was Blue Movies. In this porn infested world, the chance to look at films of people of their grandfather's generation having sex would probably get an audience anywhere, in Korea this was tantamount to revolution. Festival director Kim Hong-Joon seemed nervous at times (too many of us had made jokes about him going to jail), but packaging the films within a seminar was the way to keep the local officials content. Multiple translations kept the follow-up discussion from becoming too lively, but for the films the 500 seat auditorium was filled to capacity and included people standing four deep at the back. The conversation between the panel from curator Johannes Schonherr and local professor Joo You-Shin and programmer for Seoul's Women's Film Festival fell into the usual diatribes about the role of political freedoms, while Joo You Shin frequently found herself under attack for endorsing films that exploited women. When I floated during discussion the idea that the audience may be interested in watching more contemporary pornography within the festival, my remarks were not fully translated. Over the next few days however, I had several members of the audience come up and talk to me, one of whom indicated that the most interesting thing about the seminar was not to see pornography as that - despite filters - was readily available on the internet, but for the very fact that he could watch pornography with such a large group of people in a public place. The audience dropped to half as the panel discussion droned on, but since the whole event went on without any legal intrusion, it can be counted as a milestone in Korean cinema and another blow against oppressive censorship.

Next Section: Japanese films at PiFan 2002

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© 2002 Russell Edwards

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