The Circuit

by Shane Danielsen
A recent visit to the Jeonju International Film Festival, in South Korea, came at an interesting time. After a string of highly-touted local flops, and a marked downturn in sales of Korean films to international territories, there's a growing sense in the West that the Korean "new wave" – lauded so vocally by critics, and a staple for festival programmers over the past decade – might be over.

"It's partly true," conceded Jeonju's Programme Director, Jung Soo-wan. "We have internationally recognized filmmakers like Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-Duk, Hong San Soo . . . and thanks to big Western festivals like Cannes and Venice, their work is extremely visible internationally. But at home, yes, audiences are definitely declining. And so investors don't think it's profitable anymore to invest in the same way they did three or four years ago.

"But," she added, "there's still money out there – a lot of it. And the situation is by no means resolved. I suspect that, as soon as there's another big commercial hit, people's confidence will return and investment will resume."

For the moment, though, the major beneficiaries seem to be precisely the independent local productions which Jeonju specializes in, setting it apart from the pan-Asian titan that is Pusan. This year, for its ninth edition, the festival hosted ten World Premieres – all Korean, all shot on HD video, and all, regardless of individual quality, looking remarkable: beautifully lit, skillfully composed, and boasting production values comparable to any mainstream release. Watching, you realise that, here, the word "independent" is purely a description of funding; it has no pejorative associations, connotes no particular visual aesthetic or directing style.

And one, in particular, turned out to be a genuine find: Kim Dong-Joo's debut feature "A Broom Becomes a Goldfish" – a tale of a lonely middle-aged man's descent into murder and madness, set in a slum-like complex on the outskirts of Seoul. Framed in a succession of striking single shots, often mimicking the perspective of a CCTV camera, it seemed to signal the arrival of an idiosyncratic new talent.

Outside, meanwhile, a hectic sense of occasion reigned – in contrast to the somewhat sleepy provincialism of Jeonju proper. The town's decision to cordon off one of its main thoroughfares – which, containing most of the major screening spaces, from the Megabox multiplex to the stately old CGV movie palace, and lined with makeshift stages and market stalls selling festival souvenirs and local handicrafts, became "Cinema Street" – meant there was a clearly delineated "festival zone", crowded until long after midnight, with visitors strolling under long arcades of colored lights.

Cyon, a local telecommunications company, sponsored a B-boy championship on the first weekend, at which local posses like "True Balance Crew" and the more enigmatic "Morning of Owl", faced off in front of a couple of hundred people. Korean hip-hop suggests that Ghostface and Kanye need lose no sleep, but their breakdancing was consistently jaw-dropping – as were the displays of graffiti art, created on the second day by local taggers.

Yet if the point of all this was to draw young people into the festival, then it seemed faintly unnecessary: at most screenings, audiences were comprised overwhelmingly of students and smartly-dressed, faintly boho twentysomethings, who seemed keen to sample the full breadth of what the program had to offer, from George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, to Stephane LaFleur's much-admired Continental: A Film Without Guns, to new work from experimental veterans like James Benning (a festival guest) and Nina Menkes.

And this mood of eager expectation was only amplified by Korea's own hyper-active star-system, which saw every visiting thesp (most of them young and good-looking in a way that implies a parallel career in K-pop) greeted with the kind of screaming adulation more commonly associated with the Beatles at Shea Stadium. It's easy, amid the market-driven nature of fixtures like Cannes and Berlin, to grow blasé about the relationship of festivals to actual filmgoers; a local event like Jeonju, aimed squarely and unapologetically at its local audience, reminds you just how thrilling they can be.