‘Tis the year for Japanese occupation era films in South Korean Cinema, it would seem – there has been a flood of them, with the most noticeable – The Age of Shadows (2016, Kim Jee-woon) – even selected as South Korea’s candidate for the Best Foreign Language Film of the 2017 Academy Awards. The Last Princess falls into this…
Tag: film
The 21st Busan International Film Festival: In Between Seasons
Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) is divided into several sections; among these, the international competition “New Currents” section holds the most importance for the new and emerging Asian directors; each year, only the select promising directors with their first or at most second features can take part in the competition to win the prestigious New Currents…
The 21st Busan International Film Festival: The Salesman
Asghar Farhadi, an Iranian filmmaker, made his first short film at the age of 13, while he attended a youth drama club. He shaped his film-making style gradually while studying Harold Pinter’s plays at the University of Teheran. He then moved on to study stage direction at the Tarbias Modares University, where he wrote for television and also wrote…
The 21st Busan International Film Festival: The Age of Shadows
Kim Jee-woon is a natural-born filmmaker who, with his alluring script-writing, has never been afraid to tackle a new film genre. With eight feature films and six shorts under his belt, he has already gone down in film history as one of the most influential Korean directors. Kim Jee-woon had no formal training in filmmaking; he…
The 21st Busan International Film Festival: Highlights of the Opening Night
The 21st Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) has finally kicked off with Zhang Lu’s A Quiet Dream; ahead of the opening night, there was a press conference for the film which was attended by the film director Lu himself, Yang Ik-june (an actor and a director, known for his independent film productions) and Lee Joo-young; on…
Introduction to Busan International Film Festival (BIFF)
Busan International Film Festival (BIFF for short) is the largest Asian film festival – and among the most prominent film festivals in the whole of Asia – that is held annually in the second largest South Korean city of Busan. The year 2016 marks already the 21st edition of the festival, even though its future…
In Conversation with Richard Wyllie
Richard Wyllie has been directing documentary films for over a decade, for channels including BBC1, ITV and Channel 4 in the UK, and PBS and Nat Geo in the US. He was part of a team that won the Royal Television Society Journalism award for their Channel 4 Dispatches investigation into the ‘Plebgate’ scandal, and…
The 24th Raindance Film Festival: Five Days on Lesvos
“The world is facing an unprecedented displacement crisis,” European Commission has said. The EU has been discussing the aforementioned issue for months; however, their help is inadequate to deal with the rising numbers of dislodged people who are predominantly refugees from war-torn countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Many people arrive in the EU after…
The 24th Raindance Film Festival: Running Eagle
In 2014, Gwen Florio – an American writer and journalist – wrote Dakota, a novel which tells the story of the former foreign correspondent Lola Wicks, who investigates the disappearance of one of the Blackfeet Tribe’s girls, Judith Calf Looking. The novel is a fascinating yet distressing tale about the tribe’s living conditions, as well as…
The 60th BFI London Film Festival: The Handmaiden Review
The South Korean film director Park Chan-wook has always been an exceptional writer of seductive and pulsating narratives, like Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and Thirst, to name just a few. His newest production, The Handmaiden, is yet another enchanting piece of writing. It is also a fascinating interpretation of the Welsh novel Fingersmith, written by Sarah Walters; while…
VIEW OF THE ARTS 