A strong European contingent gets ready to head to Busan
- The 22nd edition of South Korea’s international film festival will host the world and international premieres of several movies from Europe
Taking place from 12-21 October, the 22nd Busan International Film Festival will once again focus on the Asian film landscape, but will save a coveted space for European cinema.
The World Cinema section will host the world premiere of Promise at Dawn [+see also:
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film profile], the fifth feature film by French filmmaker Eric Barbier, starring Pierre Niney and Charlotte Gainsbourg, a French-Belgian co-production that is an adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel of the same name, in which the author recounts his childhood in Poland, his adolescence in Nice, his student life in Paris, his tough aviation apprenticeship, and his wartime stories from France, England and Africa. Olivier Marchal’s Carbon [+see also:
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film profile] is the second French-Belgian co-production world-premiering at the festival, telling the story of an ordinary man (played by Benoît Magimel) who risks losing his business and who stages a scam that turns into the heist of the century. The eagerly awaited new film by Tangerines [+see also:
film review
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film profile]’ Zaza Urushadze, The Confession [+see also:
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film profile] (Georgia/Estonia), tells the story of a former film director who starts a new life as a priest in a small mountain village in Georgia. The section will welcome 34 European (co-)productions in total.
The Flash Forward section will boast the world premieres of Bitter Flowers [+see also:
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interview: Olivier Meys
film profile], a Belgian-French-Swiss-Chinese co-production directed by Olivier Meys, which follows a Chinese woman trying her luck in Paris, and Upside Down [+see also:
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film profile] by Portugal’s Hugo Martins, which focuses on two young characters struggling with the country’s financial crisis. Bodo Kox’s The Man with the Magic Box [+see also:
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film profile] (Poland/Italy), Constanze Knoche’s Under the Family Tree [+see also:
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interview: Emma Drogunova
film profile] (Germany/Poland), Diego Olivares’ Poison – The Land of Fires [+see also:
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film profile] (Italy) and Dominik Locher’s Goliath [+see also:
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interview: Dominik Locher
film profile] (Switzerland) will have their international premieres in this section, which is also brimming with European films. All of these movies will be eligible for the Busan Bank Audience Award.
Other world premieres are set to take place in the Wide Angle section, such as Wojciech Klimala’s Hugo [+see also:
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film profile] (Poland), plus interesting cases of European-Asian co-productions, such as Andreas Hartmann’s A Free Man [+see also:
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film profile] (Germany/Japan), Jéro Yun and Marte Vold’s Letters [+see also:
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film profile] (South Korea/Norway), and Jewel Maranan’s In the Claws of a Century Wanting [+see also:
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film profile] (Philippines/Germany/Qatar).
The festival will also play host to the Asian Film Market (14-17 October), where professionals from all over the world will have the chance to build bridges between their countries (read the news on European Film Promotion’s Europe! Umbrella).
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