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The 26th Busan International Film Festival concludes today and the festival has already released its final report summarizing the crowd numbers and other relevant data: 223 films were screened comprising works from 70 countries; 76,072 distinct attendances, including for both physical and online screenings; 31 special programs featuring in-person appearances; 191 guest visits to screenings, including 40 online; and, perhaps most interestingly, only 69 “international guests” as opposed to 1,079 “domestic guests,” which means, despite the festival’s claim that it is “the first international event in Korea to be held during the pandemic,” it’s an international event only open to people who are already in the country or those from overseas who received special permission to attend, and that would seem to include guests who attend the market events. There’s nothing untoward about such a claim, but, obviously, BIFF can’t possibly reassert itself as the biggest and best film festival in Asia until the actual international component of its attendance regains its old potency. A lot of people I know can’t wait to get back.

As mentioned in an earlier post, there is no overall competition at BIFF, though a lot of niche awards are given out. The only film competition that’s sponsored by the festival is the New Currents Award for new filmmakers, which went to two films, Chinese director Wang Er Zhuo’s Farewell, My Hometown, which I didn’t see, and Korean director Kim Se-in’s The Apartment With Two Women, which I did. The latter also won the New Currents Audience Award as well as the festival’s Actress of the Year Award for the performance of Im Jee-ho. Outside the festival, Apartment also won the NETPAC Award, which is given by representatives of foreign film festivals, and the Watcha Award, a Korean prize for new filmmakers. Im’s award seems appropriate because Apartment is, if anyting, a real actors’ showcase. Kim’s script and direction exude a strong sense of autobiography spiked with hyperbolic depictions of scenes plucked from real life. Still, it’s difficult to imagine the protagonist, Yijung (Im), as a proxy for the director, who, after all, possessed the wherewithal to get into film school and make this ambitious 140-minute portrayal of a fraught mother-daughter relationship that oftens descends into comic, albeit blood-shedding arguments. Though the theme is hardly original, Kim earns points for avoiding much of the sentimental undertow that characterizes such movies. She doesn’t bother with a back story, so we never know who Yijung’s father is or why he isn’t in the picture. And though the mother, Sookyung (Yang Mal-bok), has some good reasons for demanding her 20-something daughter move out, her abject intolerance of Yijung’s presence will itself be intolerable to most sentient viewers; and while Yijung may attract sympathy for having to put up with the emotional and physical violence inherent in her mother’s attitude, her glum behavior is just as off-putting. Kim makes it very difficult to like either woman, and yet the long running time never becomes a tortuous slog because of her talent for couching these stereotypes—especially Sookyung’s penchant for youthful fashions that are not only out of her age league, but feel at least 20 years out of date—in episodes that are both credible and dramatically compelling. It’s by no means a masterpiece, but as with so many Korean films by new directors, it shows how adept the film education system is at instilling in film students the importance of conveying, as directly as possible, an original vision, even if the tools are well worn. 

In most people’s minds, film festivals without the word “fantastic” attached to them mostly deal in art house cinema, though these days the big ones show Hollywood blockbusters, even if they draw the line at the Marvel cinematic universe. In that regard, BIFF has a leg up on the competition since such distinctions in Korea tend to be purely economic. There are lots of Korean indie art house features released every year, but they get little exposure. Even the work of Hong Sang-soo, which is celebrated the world over and tends to find wide distribution in Europe, doesn’t make much money in his home country. But what would derisively be called “middle-brow cinema” in other countries gets fair play in Korea, and often the distinction between such fare and obvious blockbusters is blurry. That’s why BIFF often screens the biggest box office hits in Korea that have already been in theaters for months. For one thing, it’s a means of showing off the national product to international players (including journalists) who are coming to the festival, and it’s also a way of allowing hardcore local fans to interact with the directors and actors responsible for these hits. 

Invariably, a lot of these movies that blur the line between art house and mainstream are genre exercises, and it’s interesting that two of the entries in the New Currents section this year are pulpy indies that are obviously meant to appeal to more general audiences. One, the second feature from Japanese director Shinzo Katayama, who has worked with Bong Joon-ho, belongs to the ever-popular serial killer genre, though the production notes try to make the case that it is a trenchant study of “human nature.” The English title, Missing, does the film no favors since I can think of at least two other movies off the top of my head with the same title. (The Japanese title, Sagasu–Search–is probably no better) Those who seek it out for the kind of excitement one expects from a thriller will probably not be disappointed, but despite a few odd twists and an unconventional structure, I’m not sure if they will come away impressed. 

The premise seems simple enough. Harada (Jiro Sato) is a widower raising a high school age daughter, Kaede (Aoi Ito), on meager means. Having made a mess of a business he started, he goes from one low-paying odd job to another and finds it difficult to save enough money. Still, Kaede loves him as much as an intelligent, independent teenager can, and when he purposely goes missing one day, she rustles up all her resources to find him on her own, since the police don’t seem to take the case seriously. Her only clue is that before he disappeared, Harada said he had seen a fugitive serial killer on the train and wanted to look for him in order to claim the ¥3 million reward.

Had Katayama stuck to this simple, serviceable story–which is based on a real life serial killer story–it might have generated the requisite suspense you anticipate in such movies, but he wants too much in terms of the aforementioned “human nature” exploration, and the exposition necessitates a flashback structure that dulls the momentum of the plot and, even worse, strands the most interesting character, Kaede, in movieland limbo for almost a full hour. By the time she reappears her role in the story has changed for the worse. She goes from dogged seeker of truth to proxy conscience without proceeding through the phases that usually come with such a transformation. This lack of clear character motivation extends to the other primary characters, whose more extreme actions range from the blackly comic to conventionally grand guignol to stomach-churningly repulsive. Katayama seems to know he’s going out on a limb with these characters because he over-explains them at every turn through redundant dialogue. In the end, the viewer thinks more about the mechanics of the plotting than about what makes the characters tick.

The Korean film Seire, by first-time director Park Kang, is more straghtforward about adhering to its genre protocols. In this case the genre is ghost stories. The title refers to a Korean custom surrounding the birth of a child. For a 21-day period that extends from just before the birth to after it, the parents must follow certain rituals and avoid certain behaviors, otherwise bad luck could befall the child. The protagonist, Woojin (Seo Hyun-woo), is the new father, a salesman who takes his responsibilities seriously. He thinks the seire custom is a lot of hooey, but puts up with it for his wife’s sake. However, during the seire period he receives a message saying his old girl friend has died and he decides to go to the funeral despite his wife’s strong entreaties not to go, since one of the prohibitions of seire is that the parent must not go to a funeral. As it turns out, she’s right, but not necessarily for occult reasons. Woojin broke up with his former girlfriend after she miscarried a child that he didn’t really want in the first place, and, according to her twin sister (whom Woojin didn’t know about), the girlfriend never got over the miscarriage, or Woojin. 

Park does some very interesting things with regard to Woojin’s difficulty in distinguishing between dreams and reality, and it becomes clear rather early on that the spooky things that happen around him are mostly projections of his own nagging guilt. Given that the South Korean birth rate is even lower than Japan’s, Seire will probably not be welcomed by those in the government whose job it is to convince young Koreans to have more babies. Children themselves are not scary in Seire the way they often are in other horror movies having to do with childbirth, but Park pretty much shows everything that could possibly go wrong when you decide to have a baby. 

As I wrote yesterday, one of the challenges of attending BIFF and making the most of your time there is being able to pick up on the buzz and then responding to it. Observing the festival remotely, it’s very difficult to pick up on any buzz, but early on I heard good things about the Indian movie Pedro, which was supposed to make its world premiere last year in the Cannes’ Directors Fortnight section, but didn’t since the whole festival was cancelled. Consequently, it’s making its debut at BIFF as part of the New Currents lineup. As befits the section, it is 26-year-old director Natesh Hegde’s first feature film, following two shorts that, according to him, cover similar stories and themes. 

The titular character, played by Hegde’s father, is an electrician in a small village in Karnataka in western India. His reputation as a hard worker endears him to one of the local landowners who runs a large farm. He is also introduced early on as a doting father to a young boy, meticulously bathing him in a scene that practically glows with familial affection. Also living in the same small house is the boy’s mother, Julie, and Julie’s mother. The first hint of drama arrives at night, with the mad, drunken  shoutings of a man outside their home, most of which is aimed at Julie. Eventually, we learn that this man is Pedro’s younger brother, Bastyava, who is actually Julie’s husband. However, due to his reckless drinking habit, she kicked him out and Pedro has taken his place. 

The landowner, who allows Bastyava to bunk on his property, hires Pedro to patrol his land when his regular security guard dies suddenly. Pedro has never handled a gun, but he reluctantly takes the assignment since he needs the money for his family. His inexperience, combined with what seems to be a low sense of self-esteem, leads to a stupid mistake whose negative resonance in the village Pedro compounds through his stubborn resentments. In essence, he trades places with his brother as the village black sheep, a situation that the landowner and Pedro’s few friends try to remedy through negotiation and expiation, but Pedro is too far gone in his anger.

As a story, Pedro is a classic tragedy, except that the protagonist who is brought down by a fatal character flaw is not high-born. In fact, one of the film’s nagging mysteries is Pedro’s origin. When the villagers turn against him, they start referring to him as an “outsider,” and while the Western provenance of his given name sets him apart from others, it’s not clear from Hegde’s bare bones exposition what makes him different. In a phone conversation with the director two days after the sold-out world premiere of his movie, he told me that Pedro belongs to a lower caste and had been raised by Catholics, while the dominant culture in this part of India, which speaks the Kannada dialect, is Hindu. Pedro’s “mistake” was basically an affront to this culture, which is even worse to the villagers since they see him as being from “outside” that culture. Moreover, the authority in the village is split among the main landowner and various village leaders whose interests often conflict. There is no overriding and objective legal authority to mediate his situation, and thus he is at the mercy of the villagers’ random feelings toward him and responds with equally bitter scorn. The story’s spiraling contours are like something out of Steinbeck, where one bad decision leads to another in rapid succession until the whole world spins out of control. But Hegde’s fatalism is the quiet kind. Though the emotional violence is palpable, all physical violence takes place off screen, except for one instance when Bastyava encounters Julie alone and starts beating her for abandoning him. 

Hegde says that the village depicted is an “extension” of the place where he grew up, and most of the actors are acquaintances. When he tells me he wanted to explore what makes people go to extremes under circumstances that don’t really call for it, I ask him if his actors understood this theme and whether they accepted and appreciated it. He says that he never explained motivation or the overarching idea of the film to any of the actors. He simply put them in specific situations and asked them to “be in those moments.” He doesn’t believe they thought much about what the movie was trying to say, even though they understood the plot. The result of this kind of open-ended direction is strangely precise, from the way he incorporates the lush natural setting into the film’s emotional tone, to those scenes where the naturalism of the characters overflow into new modes of expression that convey not only how these people feel, but how the village as a whole operates. It’s an incredibly organic film, which is probably why it strikes so many people as being mysterious when, in fact, it’s so everyday.

Hegde says he did not study film. He studied journalism, and his desire to make films started after he wrote and published some short stories. He saw Abbas Kiarostami’s Closeup and, realizing film was a more “intimate medium,” decided to transmute his talent for storytelling to a visual form. He also mentions as influences Bresson and Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose penchant for stationary cameras and long master takes are evident throughout Pedro. Having never studied film formally—when I ask him if he used storyboards, he laughs and says the script was only 30 pages—he approaches everything personally. His goal was to tell a story that people didn’t have to think too much about in a “landscape” that he knew like the back of his hand.