Recipient of the Grand Prix at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, as well as the prizes for Best Actor and Best Director, this Spain-France co-production is one of the few TIFF winners that seems like it could have been a contender at Cannes or Berlin. (It also won Spain’s Goya Award for Best Picture.) The Competition films at TIFF tend to be movies that aren’t submitted for competition at more famous festivals because of rules imposed by an international film festival authority that limits such films to only one competition, and so as a group they often come across as second-tier. Reviews of The Beasts at other film festivals hinted that it was very good but lacked something crucial that would make it great, maybe because it was pegged as a thriller. Watching it a second time, I picked up on nuances that eluded me initially, and I found the tension actually doubled, despite the fact that I knew what was going to happen.
When the movie begins, the problems that will eventually boil over are already simmering. Antoine (Denis Menochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs), are a middle aged French couple who have moved to the mountains of northern Spain to start an organic vegetable farm. They are outsiders to this provincial village, and while they have made friends, their nearest neighbors, a pair of brothers named Xan (Luis Zahere) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido) who raise livestock, hate Antoine’s guts, and not just because he’s French. A Norwegian company wants to buy a large parcel of land for wind turbines, and Antoine is one of the landowners who has voted against the deal. The permanently aggrieved Xan figures the money from the sale could set him up for life and relieve him of having to “smell like shit” all the time. The director, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, keeps Antoine’s reasons for spiking the deal under wraps, but it slowly comes out that he understands how this Norwegian company works, and at one point tries to reason with Xan, saying that the company is simply looking for the cheapest land in the EU, and that the money they will pay him will not set him up for life. The gambit fails, because Antoine, a former teacher, is to Xan a “tree-hugging intellectual” who looks down on people like him. The die is cast, and it becomes clear as the two men spar and feint at each other, that the title refers not just to Xan, but also to Antoine, whose resentment for being denied a comfortable, fulfilling life makes him mean and desperate. And while I was expecting some kind of Straw Dogs confrontation, what happens is different but no less terrifying, and as the focus of the movie shifts from Antoine to Olga and their frustrated adult daughter, Marie (Marie Colomb), everything you thought about the movie’s theme and expected from the plot development turn out to be wrong.
The movie’s haunting atmosphere is deepened by the rugged landscape, the broken down stone houses that Antoine endeavors to fix up for his fellow villagers (Xan thinks he is doing it to attract more like him), and weather that can change on a dime. This is a tale about not taking people you don’t really know at face value. Xan is what he is, and the other inhabitants of these hills and forests, even when they pretend to welcome you, will just as soon wrestle you to the ground and take everything you have. It’s not a thriller. It’s a chiller, because its view of human nature will freeze your soul.
In Spanish, French and Galician. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).
This is the second feature from Chinese director Lou Ye to open theatrically in Japan this year. The previous movie, The Shadow Play, was a cynical comment on the effects of the postmillennial Chinese real estate boom. Saturday Fiction could not be any more different, as it’s a period thriller with not much to say about any particular social order except the ones that accommodated the Japanese occupation of Shanghai that both preceded and followed the attack on Pearl Harbor. However, there are similarities in the way the two stories address the way Chinese societal aims are undermined by forces that are at their core antisocial, which isn’t to say Lou is completely successful in making these points credible and compelling. Both films belong to genres that Lou was tackling for the first time. Shadow was a conventional police mystery, while Saturday trades in espionage intrigue. Lou, it should be remembered, made his name with the atmospheric Suzhou River and the sensational frankness of his 2006 Tiananmen epic Summer Palace, which was banned in China. His latest movies, while still displaying notes of transgressive art, adhere closely to ideas and devices that most moviegoers will understand immediately.
Based on at least one bestselling novel, Saturday Fiction centers on a popular stage and film actor, Jean Yu (Gong Li), who returns to Shanghai on Dec. 1, 1941, after several years of self-exile in Hong Kong, to star in a play called Saturday Fiction that is being staged by her former lover, Tan Na (Mark Chao). Chinese media are saying that Yu is actually returning to get her ex-husband (Zhang Songwen), currently detained and presumably tortured by the Japanese, sprung from confinement, and one of the major problems in Ma Yingli’s screenplay is that this ex-husband’s role in the ongoing political drama is never clarified. It seems that everyone wants him dead, whether Japanese or Chinese, and his temporary survival, even in bruised and broken form, doesn’t make much sense amidst the seething nationalist emotions at large in the city at the time, when Shanghai was called a “solitary island” because of the French and British concessions allowed by the invading Imperial Army. The play-within-the-movie is about a factory strike, thus adding another layer of danger to the proceedings, and the rehearsals are as fraught as any of the spy stuff. Pascal Greggory plays Yu’s foster father, a resident of the French concession who runs a book store as cover for his intelligence activities, which are now focused on breaking the new Japanese military codes that have been implemented to carry out the various sneak attacks planned for later in the week. He enlists his adopted daughter to play act a role that will extract the meanings of the codes from the Japanese naval intelligence attache (Joe Odagiri). Other contributors to the chaos of conflicting intentions include Tan Na’s duplicitous producer (Eric Wang), an aspiring actress (Huang Xiangli) with a hidden agenda, the attache’s thug-like security operative (Ayumu Nakajima), and the Jewish emigre concierge (Tom Wlaschiha) for the hotel where much of the action is set.
Despite the basic spy story’s total lack of believability, the movie passes as a heart-racing thriller, especially during the final half hour when all bets are off with regard to the plot and people just start shooting at anything, regardless of their loyalties. Though the production values are high-end, it’s obvious Lou wants to make something more of the material than what it is—the low-contrast black-and-white photography, the handheld camerawork, and the overlaid, oversized white textual elements all practically scream “DIY!”—and he proves himself adept at tried-and-true action cliches. Next time, he should just get himself a script that works on the same level.
In Mandarin, English, Japanese and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
A feature documentary about the novelist Patricia Highsmith makes perfect sense, since so many of her stories have been adapted into movies, thus providing perfect visual illustrations of her themes and atmospheric writing. However, this Swiss production is mostly about Highsmith’s private life, in particular her romantic life, which was turbulent but mostly hidden from view since she only had affairs with women. A few critics complain that the director, Eva Vitija, goes light on Highsmith’s notorious antisemitism and equivocates on her obsessiveness over the women she pursued. But in any case, the person who emerges from this portrait isn’t particularly likable. Vitija tries to justify her behavior by basically saying this is how great artists often are, but even the work can be off-putting for reasons that have nothing to do with style or form. The characters in the most famous books, Strangers on a Train, the Ripley series, are monsters, and she seems to like them that way.
Too much of the running time is devoted to Highsmith’s upbringing. The howlingly incongruous interviews with her Texas relatives shed absolutely no light on what it was about her time there that contributed to her personality. Though they describe her as a tomboy, they seem almost shocked when reminded she was a lesbian. After her mother remarried and moved to New York, she followed when she was 12. Vitija insists Highsmith “adored” her mother, and that the love was not returned, thus scarring the child in ways that may have come out in the resentments that fueled her novels, which most people categorize as “crime fiction,” a label she hated. In any event, once she was old enough, she legally cut her relationship to her mother, assuming that she had always been emotionally alone so why not just be financially separate as well. And while she hit pay dirt with her first published work, Strangers, which, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s movie version, turned her into a global star, she never really appreciated the limelight. Much is made of her various real estate purchases in the northeast United States and Europe, where she resided in out-of-the-way places, usually behind stone fences and dense gardens. At some point her promiscuity started ruling her life, and there are extensive interviews with several long-term lovers who attest to her volatile temper and lifelong addiction to alcohol.
Consequently, the book that gets the most attention in the documentary is her “girls novel,” The Price of Salt, published pseudonymously initially and later reprinted under its more famous title, Carol, which Todd Haynes made into a movie; and while the duplicitous, murderous Tom Ripley is credibly presented as being the character that most mirrors Highsmith herself (the author admitted she prefers writing male characters), the lovers in Carol paint a better picture of how Highsmith imagined her life would turn out. “Writing is a substitute for the life I cannot live,” she says in one interview, though many people would say she lived a charmed life—she made lots of money doing what she wanted, had many affairs with women she clearly loved, and never had to compromise her values or beliefs to make a living. She was a nasty specimen, but one that offered a prime example of the creative spirit let loose—maybe a little too loose.
In English, French and German. Opens Nov. 3 in Tokyo at Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).
Per its title, Robert Rodriguez’s uncharacteristically brainy sci-fi thriller has a disorienting effect on the viewer that may result in a condition that many of the characters in the story suffer from: They don’t remember anything of what they just did. After watching the film, I found myself struggling to piece together the particulars of the convoluted concept behind the crimes being investigated, which connect to a larger conspiracy that is meant to be horrifying but requires a certain leap of understanding that I was unable to accomplish.
Ben Affleck plays it straight as Danny Rourke, a police detective who is still mourning the disappearance of his daughter at the hands of a kidnapper. Though the kidnapper was eventually caught, he has no memory of abducting the girl and therefore cannot reveal whether she is alive or where she is. Some time later, during a particularly exciting bank heist, Rourke discovers that the people carrying it out have been hypnotized by a criminal mastermind with expertise in the art of suggestion. At this point, the possibilities are intriguing for a fairly conventional police procedural, since Rourke makes a connection between the kidnapping and the robbery, but any moviegoer conversant in thriller tropes will automatically see a red flag: Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that this particular detective is tasked with solving the robbery, especially since he was pointed to it by an anonymous tip? As it happens, the tipster turns out to be psychic (Alice Braga) who warns Rourke of the mastermind’s particular powers, and from there the detective learns about a shady government program to develop such powers for its own sake.
The movie’s swift, deep dive into an alternate reality loses the original plot, and as is often the case with alternate realities, characters are never what they seem, and thus the viewer just gets frustrated with the liberties that Rodriguez takes with the whole concept. You can’t rely on anyone or any situation, and so the story can be anything it wants to be at any given moment. In the end, this bait-and-switch method seems to be a means of hiding the fact that the story, which Rodriguez has been trying to sell for twenty years, was never much to begin with. Without Affleck’s participation, most likely it wouldn’t have been made.
Opens Oct. 27 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
The dean of this year’s Chanel X BIFF Asian Film Academy (BAFA) was veteran Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa (M/other, Paris je t’aime), who seemed particularly enthused by both the process and the goals of the Academy. For those who don’t know, BAFA selects 24 budding Asian filmmakers, brings them to Busan in the middle of September, and has them work on short films that are to be completed by the end of the Busan International Film Festival. Though such a task is daunting in and of itself, one of the most important aspects of the work is that it’s carried out while the festival itself is going on. And while most of the fellows don’t have much time to watch movies or schmooze with visiting film professionals, the fact that it’s all going on around them has a stimulating effect on their work.
–How many times have you attended BIFF, and what do you see as its main role?
I’ve been to BIFF three times—this is my third. I came as a jury member once. The second time I brought my film, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, and now this third time I am the dean of BAFA. My first impression was that this film festival was really young and had a lot of energy. You can see that energy in how much the people who attend it love film. It seems like the whole city of Busan gives off this kind of energy. I was very envious. In contrast, the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) has not played a proper role as a film festival for the world, but Busan does. It has global recognition. You can see how Busan is the core of one of the biggest networks in Asia showcasing films so as to spread the word internationally about Asian cinema.
–In that regard, how important is Busan to Japanese filmmakers?
When I looked at this year’s lineup I saw the names of some of the students I taught at Tokyo University of the Arts who were bringing their films to the festival. Busan provides a very good gateway for young filmmakers to introduce their films to the rest of the world and to other film festivals. But when it comes to TIFF, even if you present your film there it doesn’t provide a gateway to other international film festivals. When I see emerging filmmakers like Ryusuke Hamaguchi presenting their films at international festivals in Japan, they don’t really reach out into the world, even if the work is amazing. But festivals like Busan and San Sebastian and Locarno lend their films prestige, and Busan provides a stage that propels them out into the world.
–Can you describe the special advantages that BAFA offers the fellows?
There is a also a film workshop attached to Tokyo Filmex called Tokyo Talents that is supposed to foster young Asian filmmakers. It’s similar to BAFA but run quite differently. There the young filmmakers pitch their projects and, depending on those pitches, they are matched up with producers. But it only goes up to the development stage. What’s unique about BAFA is that the fellows experience production and creation all the way up to the screening of their films. There’s a lot of instruction involving production knowhow, so what they learn from the program is quite diverse and tremendous. You can see that diversity in the wide range of nationalities represented. Some of the countries the fellows are from don’t have formal film schools where young filmmakers can learn practical skills.
–I just interviewed a young man from Indonesia. He never studied film, and just submitted a short he made on his own. He has ideas but no technical skills, so Tokyo Talents would have been useless.
Some fellows are from places where there are only independent filmmakers making independent films, so it’s very lonely work. And that’s why they are here with other fellows. When they have a chance to meet people who think the way they do even though they are from a different country, and are of a similar age, maybe it will spur their creativity.
–What do you see as your role as the dean?
I have been involved in film education for a long time. I taught at a university and also ran workshops for kids. Through these experiences I devised a consistent philosophy, and in terms of filmmaking I have more experience than these young people, but when it comes to music and fine arts I think that extensive experience doesn’t always help the creative process. It’s wrong to say, “I know this but you don’t know it, so I’ll teach you.” It doesn’t really work that way. When you are teaching something the recipient of that instruction should not know anything. I want to be in a different position. As long as we have a common idea with those who have a desire to create something, I just want to stand by them.
–Can you describe your instruction method? What actually happens during the production?
I only watch.
–Do they ask you for advice?
We don’t talk much. It’s almost the same as a children’s workshop. You try to go into this group of children and speak to them, but then it is just me talking to each child. But if I go away they talk to each other. That is important for children. When it comes to particular skills necessary at the moment, like lighting adjustment, then I will make a comment.
–What qualities in a young filmmaker are important for them to become a good filmmaker?
Positivity.
–Meaning optimism?
A director has to care about many things. What is the weather tomorrow? Is the actor in a good frame of mind? Any negative characteristics get in the way of moving forward. {Director] Kiyoshi Kurosawa always says, “Everything will be OK, whatever happens.” Without that way of thinking, it will be very painful for the filmmaker. When it comes to making a film more contemporary or more avant garde, probably if you just use your existing skills it won’t be enough. In that case you have to be creative. Jean-Luc Godard once said that when you deal with amateurs you have to be a professional, and when you deal with professionals you have to act like an amateur. You have to hold this ambivalence. When I see an amateur, they are like someone who says, “Why do we need a script?” They’re like kids. But when you’re a professional, you take the script for granted. Then there’s this question of: Why do I do this? That’s what comes from being creative.
One of three mainstream Korean blockbusters released recently that take place in a war-torn country—the other two being Escape from Mogadishu and Ransomed—and one of two based on a true incident, The Point Men, like Ransomed, deals with a hostage crisis in the Middle East and for reasons that aren’t too difficult to figure out, their structures and overall dramatic arc are almost identical. There’s an initially self-serving but eventually self-sacrificing diplomat who takes it upon himself to go over the heads of his superiors and negotiate with the kidnappers on his own terms. More significantly, there is a Korean national-gone-native in the respective countries where the movies are set who acts as the interlocutor with the foreign adversaries—in either case a totally fictional character and one who provides the comic relief that almost all Korean action films require, though, to me, the main utility of these characters is that they obviate the necessity for other Korean characters to speak English at length. Veteran star Hwang Jung-min, an actor I usually like, has already proved himself a terrible English speaker, and here, as the foreign ministry negotiator, he’s forced to use the language a little too much, so the relief provided by the interpreter is more than just comic.
Also like Ransomed, The Point Men is pitched as a kind of contentious buddy flick, though in the former the combo was the civil servant and the comic relief guy. Here, it’s the civil servant and a rogue Korean intelligence agent who wanders the Middle East doing God knows what in order to redeem himself for the death of a colleague at the hands of the Islamic State. (We first meet him getting sprung from prison for counterfeiting.) As played by the hunky-by-edict Hyun Bin, an actor who is guaranteed to boost box office outside of Korea (maybe inside as well, but these days those bets are off), this character, Park Dae-sik, really has nothing to do except bounce insults off of Jung Jae-ho (Kwang) in his attempt to save the day himself by rescuing 23 Korean missionaries who’ve been kidnapped by the Taliban in Aghanistan in 2007. This setup is one of the clearest examples ever of the cliche “based on a true incident” being deflective bullshit, because while a group of missionaries really was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2007, they certainly weren’t rescued by these two clowns in this way. Firstly, by all reports, the Korean people were quite pissed off about the missionaries, who used a loophole to sneak into a Muslim-majority country to proselytize and then cost the government a lot of money to secure their release—an aspect that is hardly discussed in the film. Secondly, Jung’s go-it-alone methodology when his superiors opt to try and rescue the hostages by force seems patently unreasonable, and was obviously contrived to inject dramatic tension into a story that didn’t really need it had it been told straight. And thirdly, Park’s existence is never less than superfluous, except for the mandatory car chase in which, riding a pilfered motorcycle, he endeavors to retrieve a couple million dollars in cash from some scammers in a GMC truck.
The script occasionally shows signs of intelligence, especially with regard to how difficult it is for diplomats with no practical on-site experience to predict how representatives of different cultures are going to react to their overtures; but by the same token, the make-or-break final negotiation is so tortuously constructed for the sake of suspense that it inadvertently takes on a comic tone, as if Jung, who initially was more worried about PR than saving lives, turns into Super Negotiator simply and suddenly by force of will, rendering his Taliban counterpart a receding puddle in the face of his formidable intellect. The heroics in The Point Men is the whole point, but who really believes government factotums think or act this way? Certainly not the normally, and rightly, cynical South Korean public.
In Korean, English, Pashtun and Arabic. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).
I normally use the chosen English title for non-English language films in this space, but the one the producers hit upon for this French thriller, The Sitting Duck, sounded too much like something Jerry Lewis would have directed, and though I’m aware French cinephiles adore Lewis, it seems highly inappropriate in this case, so I’m sticking with the original French title, which translates as “The Trade Unionist.” That’s more fitting, if perhaps a bit too generic for the sexual politics on display, since the protagonist is the union representative for the employees of Areva, the huge French engineering company that builds nuclear power plants, mostly in Europe, though they did have something to do with the Fukushima Daiichi Plant that melted down in 2011. In fact, the movie opens that same year—not in Japan, but rather in Hungary, where female workers at an Areva plant are demanding better pay and benefits and their French representative, Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert), is staunchly defending them against their staunchly sexist boss. Kearney is an actual person, and she is able to stand up to these chauvinists because the president of Areva, Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs), is a woman who made it to the top the hard way. Unfortunately, the disaster in Fukushima and other matters conspire to unseat her at the next board election and she is replaced by the less sympathetic Luc Oursel (Yvan Attal), who, it turns out, is in the pocket of a wealthy investor trying to steer Areva’s Chinese connections to a rival company, which would mean a huge loss of jobs for Areva. Kearney gets wind of this via a whistleblower and contacts the government minister in charge of such matters, and then all hell breaks loose.
The thing is, these political intrigues aren’t really the subject of the film, which is just as well since the director, Jean-Paul Salomé, sucks at pacing. It’s difficult to get a handle on the real-life ramifications, be they legal or ethical, of Oursel’s machinations when the facts are rammed up against one another. All we know is that they’ll be bad for the people Kearney represents. The only thing these scenes succeed in doing is present her as a middle-aged, upper middle class woman with a thing for heavy makeup, high heels, and hairstyles better suited for someone 15 years younger who is also fiercely dedicated to doing the right thing, regardless of personal cost. Her pursuit of her boss in the media and the courts results in phone threats and stalking that finally culminate in a home invasion-cum-sexual attack that leaves her wounded and traumatized. And that’s where the movie literally begins (and begins twice more during the film’s two-hour run time). As it turns out, the police don’t really buy the story, and it’s revealed that Kearney has been raped in the past and is under the care of a psychiatrist. They say her testimony about the attack doesn’t add up, and she is eventually labeled a “madwoman” in the press.
Though the investigation into the attack and the subsequent did-she-or-didn’t-she implications create tensions that draw the viewer into the story, there’s still a lot that gets in the way. Salomé’s already established habit of making it difficult to follow the line of intent sometimes results in mixed signals: Are we supposed to agree with the police and think Kearney made it all up? Though her husband, Gilles (Grégory Gadebois), stands by his wife, it sometimes seems like he doesn’t, which isn’t Gadebois’ fault but rather the way Salomé jerks the story around in an attempt to manipulate the viewer’s expectations, and that’s unfair in a movie which purports to be based on a true story. What Kearney goes through is horrific—she is basically raped three times, once in actuality, and twice psychologically by the justice system. It’s a classic tale of the victim being blamed for her victimization, and while I was totally fascinated with the way it played out, I myself felt played out after it was all over.
In French and English. Opens Oct. 20 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (0570-6875-5280).
Khozy Rizal served double duty at the 28th Busan International Film Festival. On the one hand, his short film, Basri & Salma in a Never-ending Comedy, was part of the special program Renaissance of Indonesian Cinema. But he was also one of the fellows at this year’s Chanel X BIFF Asian Film Academy, an exclusive program that brings young Asia Filmmakers to Busan during the festival for several weeks to actually produce a short film. I was introduced to Rizal casually by the press office as a means of explaining the Academy, which they obviously wanted to promote, but the particular circumstances that brought him to Busan were so fascinating that we talked for the better part of 45 minutes. I learned a lot, not only about Indonesian cinema, but about the process of becoming a filmmaker when you essentially have nothing but your wits.
–How did you get into the Academy?
I submitted a questionnaire along with my work, two short films. But I didn’t go to film school. I learned filmmaking by watching lots of movies.
–Is that the same with the other fellows?
I think most of them went to film school. During the motivational night I told them I’ve made 3 short films so far, but I don’t know the real work of filmmaking from the conventional filmmaking perspective, so I think I need to learn it from actual filmmakers. That’s why I wanted to be in the program.
–Have you always been a film buff?
Yeah, since I was 5 years old. When I was a kid in the early 2000s, the DVD era, I lived right next to a rental shop so if I had any money I would rent a DVD. It became a habit with me. Even when I grew up, when I was in junior high I would always watch films.
–What kind of movies did you like?
I would say it shifted from time to time. When I was a kid I didn’t speak English at all, and watching films with subtitles was hard, so I always watched Indonesian films, usually horror movies. They used to have sex horror films, and lots of them. [laughs] And then when I was in high school, I became aware of several films that won Oscars, and my English skills improved and I started watching lots of films from America. And it shifted again when I was in college, so I moved out of my small city to study and watched more films and became aware of film festivals like Cannes. I later found out about non-Hollywood films and films from other foreign countries, so I started watching French films and became aware that there were so many great films in the world.
–It’s always a very eye-opening realization.
I discovered all of these movies, and some of them were really connected to me in terms of issues that we dealt with in my country, and I thought, if I were a filmmaker I could make films that would attract the same kind of attention, but I wanted to direct it the way some directors I admired would direct it. When I graduated from college, I worked in an office from 9 to 5, and at night would go to cinemas. And I thought to myself, it would be great if I could direct a film talking about queer themes, but they would be characters from my home town and speak the same language. That would be really cool, but I didn’t have the chance to make it because I’m not in the film industry and didn’t know anybody in the film industry. Finally, I had the audacity to make something on my own. I made my first film with a smart phone. It was a short film about two young girls who happened to be in love and were attending an Islam boarding school. And I submitted it to a festival in Paris and it won.
–That’s great.
Yeah, I couldn’t believe it. It’s a secret film that I can’t really expose, but it’s called Anisap. And the award came with a money prize, which was really big—20,000 euros. I could make another short with it, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I don’t know anyone in the industry and I don’t know how to make films. So I texted or DMed every producer in Indonesia, and they either refused or didn’t even respond. Then I met with this scriptwriter who had encouraged me to make Anisap. He used to be my mentor. I had joined a master class with him and he encouraged me to make it. He thought I was a good storyteller. So I went back to him and said, “Maybe you’ve forgotten me, but you encouraged me to make a film and I did and it won. Do you know any producer that’s willing to make my film? I have money but no producer.” He introduced me to a producer in Indonesia and we made [my next film] together. It’s called Makassar, the City for Football Fans, and it went to Sundance in 2022. It’s a pretty rough title, 20 minutes long. At Sundance everybody was like, Who is this person? And I made another short film right after.
As preparation for my coverage of the 28th Busan International Film Festival, which took place Oct. 4-13, I talked via Zoom to the interim festival director, Nam Dong-chul, who is also the chief programmer for the festival. Nam sort of made it clear that he was not gunning for the permanent title of festival director, and that he was simply filling in so that this year’s event could take place on time. In fact, he was surprisingly frank during our conversation, though perhaps not as frank as he was during the online press conference in early September to announce the selections. In response to a reporter’s question of why BIFF had given the Filmmaker of the Year award to Chow Yun-fat, thus making it two years in a row that a Chinese person was the recipient, Nam said, “Well, he was going to receive it eventually.”
–What’s been the biggest challenge so far this year?
After I took over, I found out we have some problems with the budget and I had to cut funding for almost everything in order to keep the budget in check. It was a big decision. So this year, we have 209 official selections, compared to last year’s 243 films.
–In 2019 it was around 300.
Yes. During the pandemic the official number of selections was less than 200, and then it came back to around 240, but this year around 210. Because it’s a bit late in the process it was not easy to convince the programmers that they had to minimize their selections. It was tough. Also, I had to review all the other programs, like forums and conferences.
–Well, the Forum is gone.
Yes. Also I had to check the invitation list and decide what we could provide to our international guests. I was surprised at how expensive air tickets are. Everything became related to the budget.
–Is it due to lack of sponsorship, or lack of government support?
The funding from the city government was smaller compared to last year. Sponsorship from the private sector was also lower than last year.
–Is that a reflection of the economic situation?
Yes, it’s related to Korea’s general economic situation. This year, especially, prices have been going up and private companies are having difficulties with their own finances.
–What about your relationship with Busan? Or even the national government?
The relationship with Busan city is quite good now. They want to support us. However, the economic situation in Busan itself is not so good and that has an effect. It’s the same for the central government. The problem is that after this year, meaning next year, the Korean Film Council says its total budget for international film festivals [in Korea} will be cut by 50 percent.
philipbrasor.com 