Been plagued by technical problems ever since I arrived. I bought a Wow card, which you can charge with any denomination of currency and use pretty much everywhere in Korea, including public transportation, which is what I bought it for. The first day it wouldn’t work and I had to go to the station office and they explained to me that I had to set up part of the card just for transportation. It took me a while to figure out how to do that but I finally did. Then, one of my email accounts doesn’t work at all here, not on my phone nor on my computer. It’s always worked here before, so I don’t know what the problem is. Then there’s the ticketing system, which was changed. I haven’t had too much trouble getting the tickets through the online system, though the first day I felt like one of those K-pop fans trying to get a ticket to their favorite idol’s concert. The problem came when I had to pull up the mobile ticket on my phone at the entrance to the theater. It just wouldn’t come up. Fortunately, a volunteer who spoke English believed my story and let me into the theater after the movie started. I had no problem at the next screening, but this morning it happened again, though I was finally able to produce the ticket by logging out and turning off my phone and then starting the whole procedure again. I got in with a minute to spare.

I attended the press conference for Jafar Panahi, who won this year’s Asian Filmmaker Award. As he pointed out a number of times, he was at the first BIFF in 1996 and has been here a half dozen times since, but there was a long gap when he couldn’t attend because he was either in jail or forbidden to leave Iran. The press conference took place before the press screening of his latest film, the Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident, so he didn’t talk much about the film. He talked at length about the movie being submitted for an Oscar the day before yesterday. None of his movies have ever been in Oscar contention because the Academy receives nominations from countries, not individuals or producers, and in Iran Panahi is persona non grata. But this year, France was gracious enough to submit his film because it’s one of the producing countries. I don’t know what that means for France’s submission of a French-language film, because it didn’t come up. He also talked at length about the regime’s ban on his filmmaking activities and how he resisted. “My co-writer was put in jail and just got out,” he said. “He’s spent one-fourth of his life in prison. Under a dictatorship, you must find a way to make the films you want to make; you have to pay for this struggle.”

The movie itself, which I saw an hour or so later, is certainly not going to change the regime’s opinion of Panahi. (I’m still not sure why they let him travel abroad now) It’s a serious melodrama with an undercurrent of the ridiculous that I’ve often found confusing in Panahi’s work. A family’s car breaks down and they bring it to a repair shop, where the proprietor hears the father walking around and realizes from the sound that he has an artificial leg. It reminds him of the time he was arrested and tortured by the authorities, because whenever his tormentor walked his leg made that sound. He kidnaps the man and for the rest of the movie enlists comrades who were also tortured to help him confirm if it’s the monster who made their lives hell. There’s a lot of implausible stuff in the story, but dramatically it may be Panahi’s most potent work, The last 20 minutes is especially harrowing.

But it didn’t drain me as much as The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Tunisian film that won the runner-up prize at Venice. The director, Kaouther Ben Hania, incorporates actual voice recordings of the incident she depicts in the dramatic recreation of that incident, meaning she uses actors (though occasionally she will also insert actual video of what happened). Immediacy is guaranteed, and it becomes impossible to escape the feelings that the people on the screen are expressing in real time. It all takes place in the offices of Red Crescent, which “coordinates” rescues of civilians in Arab states who are caught in battles. The title refers to a six-year-old girl who is in a car with family members in Gaza who are all killed in a rain of Israeli gunfire. She is the only survivor, and talks with the operators at Red Crescent, who try to arrange for an ambulance to help her, but that requires cutting through an enormous mountain of red tape, including gaining permission (via the Red Cross) from the Israeli military to send the ambulance. Meanwhile the little girl is becoming more frightened and desperate. Office politics has never been so fraught with actual danger and suffering. 

From there the Japanese movie, Love on Trial, was a welcome relief, even if it was not really that good. I went because I found the premise intriguing: a member of an idol girl group is sued by her management for embarking on a love affair, an action that is prohibited in her contract. Director Koji Fukada recreates a believable milieu in which the idol quintet works and lives, and the situations he sets up are compelling, especially with regard to how the idols interact with their male fans, who are predictably creepy because they seem so normal otherwise. The idol who is being sued is in love not with a fan but with an old classmate who reenters her life and who doesn’t care for idol music. Though Fukada keeps the court room scenes to a minimum, he can’t overcome the clunkiness of the legal exposition, and the latter half of the movie feels sort of aimless, as it he’s not really sure where he wants to go with this theme of individual rights in an industry that makes money from creating images that comfort lonely men.

Japan also figured in Good News, a big budget Korean Netflix movie that purports to be a fantasy reimagining of the 1970 JAL airliner hijacking by the Japanese Red Army, which commandeered it to take them to Pyongyang. The movie lets you know right from the start with a cheeky introduction that this is not the way it happened but maybe it’s the way it should have happened. A stellar cast of Korean A-listers play up the comical aspects of the plot, which has the KCIA figuring out a way to save the passengers on board and thus making the Japanese authorities not only look like fools, but also placing Korea in Japan’s debt. The scheme is to get the hijackers to believe Seoul’s Gimpo Airport is Pyongyang. The comic possibilities are endless, and ace blockbuster  director Byun Sung-hyun doesn’t neglect any of them. At times, the plotting gets a little too arcane, especially when it addresses Korea’s servile relationship with the U.S., but the dynamics between Korea and Japan are deliciously bitter, taking in not only the resentments held over from the colonial period, but those sparked by the realization that while Korea was mired in dictatorial leadership, Japan was becoming the second biggest economy in the world. As usual, the movie is more critical of Korea than it is of Japan, but Japan ends up looking pretty ridiculous, too. A fun ride.