guardian.co.uk,
Associated Press, Wednesday 3 October 2012
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| Han Jong Sim plays the lead role in the North Korean film Comrade Kim Goes Flying. Photograph: AP |
A South
Korean film festival that is among Asia's showcase cinematic events will screen
a North Korean film for the first time in almost a decade as well as six
classic Afghan movies that were hidden in a wall to save them from the Taliban.
The Busan
international film festival, a glitzy, nine-day affair that opens on Thursday,
has become a way for Asian nations such as China and especially South Korea to
highlight their rise in world popular culture.
This year's
festival will even take a break from film for a performance by the South Korean
rapper PSY, who galloped to global fame with his song Gangnam Style.
But films
from two nations not normally on the radar of regional cinephiles are also
drawing attention.
Comrade Kim
Goes Flying, which was co-directed by a North Korean and two Europeans, is the
first North Korean film to screen at the South Korean festival since 2003. The
movie, about a young woman who runs off to join the circus as an acrobat, won
the award for best director at the two-yearly Pyongyang international film
festival last month.
Observers
are curious to see how local audiences will react to it while relations remain
badly frayed between the two nations, which are still technically at war.
Kim
Ji-seok, one of the festival organisers, said: "There is great expectation
among South Korean viewers about this film because they can have a rare look
into the northern neighbour's film-making world without political
worries." Kim noted that organisers had determined the North Korean film
to be "free from ideologies and propaganda".
Six Afghan
movies, made from the 1960s to the 1980s, will also be shown, including Like
Eagle, a 1965 work about a girl travelling in Kabul.
The films
were hidden in a wall when the radical Islamist Taliban regime took power in
the 1990s and banned most forms of entertainment, including movies. The films
resurfaced in 2004 after the Taliban were ousted.
Kang
Yu-jung, a South Korean film critic, said: "These Afghan films shed a
light on the lives of people in a country that we have only known as war-torn
and once a hideout for Osama bin Laden. Their screening shows that this part of
Asia has started to have an interest in the stories of Afghans, not just in the
country's political situation."
The
festival, held since 1996 in the south-eastern port city of Busan, is
considered the biggest of its kind in east Asia. It has expanded rapidly, along
with the region's film industry, led by China and South Korea. Those countries'
films and stars will dominate this year's event.
Cold War, a
Hong Kong gangster thriller featuring the stars Andy Lau and Aaron Kwok, opens
the festival, and the Chinese actor Tang Wei will host the opening ceremony.
Other films
drawing attention include Kim Ki-duk's Pieta, the brutal story of a debt
collector who cripples those who are unable to pay him until he meets a woman
who claims to be his mother. It took the Golden Lion award for best picture at
last month's Venice festival, becoming the first South Korean film to do so.
Some of the
biggest buzz has been around the South Korean director Hur Jin-ho's Dangerous
Liaisons, which is set in 1930s Shanghai and stars South Korea's Jang Dong-gun
and Cecilia Cheung, from China. Organisers said tickets for the movie sold out
in just 12 seconds.
A film with
a political angle is National Security, based on a memoir written by an
opposition politician who faced torture under South Korea's military regime in
the 1980s.
Other films
making their world premieres include The Commander and the Stork, a joint
Italian-Swiss comedy about a widowed man who falls in love with a poor artist;
El Condor Pasa, a South Korean film about a Catholic priest who gets involved
the death of a teenage girl he cherishes; and A Motor Home Adventure, a Chinese
movie about a man who is trying to find a child he may have had with one of his
36 former girlfriends in the hope of receiving a bone marrow transplant.
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