14 pics to preem at Prada Transformer

Ultramodern exhibition space to host festival

By BOBBIE WHITEMAN

Fourteen films chosen by helmer Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu under the title of "Flesh, Mind and Spirit" will play in ultramodern new exhibition space Prada Transformer, designed by architect Rem Koolhaas, next to Seoul's 16th century Gyeonghui Palace.

The program, which begins on June 27, is co-curated by Los Angeles-based film critic and radio host Elvis Mitchell. Pics range from Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1955 "Ordet" to Kim Ji-woon's 2008 Korean Western "The Good, the Bad and the Weird." Pics will be shown one per day for two weeks.

"It is a great privilege and a great joy for me to be able to share these masterpieces with the people from Seoul, since they are not easy to see nowadays in a screening room," said Gonzalez Inarritu. "Selecting a dozen films is a difficult task. You become an immediate traitor of 100 others, but all these films provoked in me appetites that I never knew I had."

The Transformer is a 160-ton steel tetrahedron with a white polyvinyl chloride membrane  designed to accommodate cultural, artistic and fashion events.

It opened in September with clothing exhibition "Waist Down." Then the structure was picked up and rotated to create a rectangle on which to show the movies until July 12.

-- Bobbie Whiteman