I spoke to two people yesterday who have been working with and within the Korean film industry for a number of years, and both pretty much thought the new Competition Section of the festival is not going to achieve what the festival hopes it will. This is the first year that BIFF has had a Competition Section outside of the New Currents Award, which is for indie art films by emerging filmmakers. The idea of a Competition Section is mainly to gain attention from the media, who like nothing better than a battle. I’ve always admired BIFF because it took itself seriously as the premiere Asian film festival and didn’t bother with stunts like competitions. It just showed quality films. But apparently the festival has hit a wall after COVID and the film industry itself is crumbling, so they have to do something. The trouble is, all the highest quality Asian films try first to get into competitions at the big Western festivals, so there are few left for Busan. Consequently, the films in the BIFF Competition are mostly also-rans, which isn’t to say they aren’t good, but rather that, like the movies that are in the Tokyo International Film Festival Competition Section, nobody really cares that much about them. The two people I talked to said as much.

One of the Competition films I saw yesterday may be a case in point. En Route To is an earnest Korean indie youth film that tackles some weighty issues with a distinctive dramatic flair, but it’s probably not original enough to make a bid impression. A girl attending a boarding high school is knocked up by her teacher, who then disappears after he learns the girl is pregnant. The girl decides to get an abortion, thinking if she does, the teacher will come back, but she has no money for the pills she has to buy illegally on the internet, so she steals money from her roommate, who sells vape liquids to fellow students under the table. This series of events leads to a kind of bitter friendship between the two girls, especially since the roommate is the daughter of a single mother—an illegitimate child who thinks the other girl is better off getting rid of the baby, but then the other girl changes her mind. Besides dealing with its tricky themes frankly and honestly, the movie is always surprising in the choices it makes, though in the end the story becomes a bit too contrived. Everything doesn’t have to fit into place so perfectly.

My first documentary of the festival is from India. I, Poppy is purposely partisan. It takes the side of lower caste farmers in India who are constantly taken advantage of by the government, which buys their crop to make hundreds of medicines, including morphine, of course. As the film points out right away, the price of opium hasn’t  changed in more than 25 years, and most farmers are on the verge of bankruptcy. In addition, the government is stingy with the license needed to grow poppies, and often use it as a means of extorting bribes. The film focuses on one man, the son of an elderly poppy farmer, who leads an activist group to protest government corruption. As he explains, some farmers who can’t make a living end up selling their opium to criminal organizations to make into heroin, and they’re caught, they can go to jail for a long time. The problem is, this man’s activism has alienated his family, who are afraid the government will respond to his protests by taking out their anger on his family, and, in fact, they do just that. It’s an excellent documentary in that it explains the issues in a clear and straightforward manner. Whether it leads to any action, which if wants to do, obviously, is another matter. Poppy farming in India is the very definition of a narrow niche issue.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers is another Competition movie, which is strange since it already won the main prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Set in Hokkaido, the movie comes in two parts, each one based on a manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge. The first one is framed as a movie-within-a-movie by our protagonist, the screenwriter Li (Shim Eun-kyung), a Korean expatriate living in Japan. The second, meatier story has Li, presumably inspired by a film professor in the first section, traveling to a hot spring resort in winter without a reservation, and thus being forced to set up in a remote inn that doesn’t seem to have had a guest in decades. The movie is often drily funny and moves rather slowly for a 90-minute production. And while the director, Sho Miyake, tries for a naturalistic effect, the dialogue is a bit unruly. People in movies don’t necessarily have to speak the way people in real life do, but everybody here talks like a philosopher. 

The final movie I saw was My Home, a Korean horror movie that is obviously trying to capitalize on the success of the Korean exorcist movie Exhuma from a few years back. This one also ropes in two current social issues: elderly people dying alone (as in Japan), and a program to place students who can’t afford apartments in homes of older people who live alone. The premise here is that the girl who applies for a home sharing gig hits the jackpot by being matched with a women who lives in a luxury apartment. The horror aspect develops slowly as the young woman is visited by strange sounds in the night and is plagued by nightmares. Eventually, the story involves shamanism and evil spirits taking over bodies. Though scary in spots, it isn’t very suspenseful, and as with Exhuma, the use of rituals and magic is pretty much anything the screenwriter wants it to be, meaning it doesn’t have to make any sense, and it doesn’t.