OUTLAND EMPIRE: Nicolas Rapold reports from the 10th Jeonju International Film Festival
The Jeonju International Film Festival celebrated its silver anniversary with a sterling edition of its annual Digital Project. In Hong Sang-soo’s often hilarious entry, a Seoul woman’s visit to her friend in Jeonju uncorks a series of entanglements and embarrassments involving a philandering writing teacher—some of which boasted location shooting in a neighborhood of love motels (which somehow slipped off your trusty correspondent’s sight-seeing itinerary). Naomi Kawase and Lav Diaz expanded on the omnibus theme of “visitation” with tales that were, respectively, becalmed (a man commemorating his grandfather’s heroism in a mountain village) and menacing (a breezy Filipina expat returns to squalor and distrust).
Partial retrospectives of Jerzy Skolimowski and Pere Portabella were presented alongside a Sri Lankan showcase that reflected the fest’s continued dedication to national cinemas that are unknown quantities to most viewers. Elder statesman Dharmasena Pathiraja appeared in person with other, highly cinephilic filmmakers including 2007 Cannes prizewinner Vimukhti Jayasundara (The Forsaken Land). Badly in need of restoration, Pathiraja’s work stretches back to the Seventies, displaying a Marxist awareness and an appealing feel for friendship among young men and open spaces. Contemporary dramas from Prisanna Vithanage, Asoka Handagama, and others comprised the balance of the survey, which acquired a special resonance given the sectarian standoff that was taking place in their home country at the time of the festival.
In the international competition, Filipino director Sherad Anthony Sanchez’s Imburnal garnered the jury’s top prize. This drifting three-hour space-out, more or less about rural kids and teens hanging out, rhymed well with two shorts by Diaz (his digital entry, and the noise-rock spirit-walk Purgatorio) and a four-film sidebar dedicated to Sanchez’s countryman Raya Martin (whose new films Independencia and Manila screened at Cannes). The expansive rice farm in Uruphong Raksasad’s Agrarian Utopia often fulfilled the title’s promise—depicted with Apichatpong-esque digital-pastoral splendor—but the film topped out with documentary moments of children at play and farmers at work. In The Happiest Girl in the World, the debut of Death of Mr. Lazarescu AD Radu Jude, a rural teen wins a contest sponsored by a fruit drink and then must go to the big city to shoot an ad for the product. The scenario of interminable re-shoots suggests that not every Romanian film can pull off absurdity and pathos through reiteration and real-time drama.
Among other international offerings, the late Jun Ichikawa’s final film, Buy a Suit (pictured above), follows a sister searching for her eccentric homeless brother and then reconnecting him with his funky ex-lover. Ichikawa apparently finished editing the HD-shot work shortly before his death; its 47 minutes glow with an affecting tone of bemusement and melancholy. Olivier Assayas’s two-part TV documentary Eldorado chronicles the fruitful collaboration between choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Their fascinating cross-disciplinary conversations illuminate the decisions, both highly specific and soulfully general, that go into the artistic process; the film concludes with a fluid record of one performance.
Most of the contemporary Korean selections were upstaged by a restoration of Sweet Dream, a lovely 1936 talkie about a fugitive housewife, and The Horn, a promising, meditative short by Yim Kyung-dong that opens with the discovery of an abandoned car by a lake. Rounding out the festival’s sections was the annual Masterclass. This year was devoted to film criticism, conducted via post-screening lectures: two by Raymond Bellour (Philippe Grandrieux’s A Lake and Chris Marker’s Level Five), and one each by Richard Porton (WR: Mysteries of the Organism and anarchist realism) and Adrian Martin (Manny Farber by way of Pialat’s La Gueule ouverte). Martin’s stirring evocation of one aspect of Farber’s ethos provided an apt conclusion—and working philosophy—for the festival experience: roughly quoted, “Don’t tame the wildness. Embrace it.”
