Korean Cinema at the Vanishing Point: The 30th Busan International Film Festival

The 30th Busan International Film Festival was a curious mixture, both a continuation of the festival of the past decade as well as a return to the feel of the late 2000s, when I first attended. There were many Korean world premieres, a record number in fact, but the edition was also a much more star-studded and celebrity-focused affair than in recent years, undoubtedly as a celebration of the landmark anniversary but also an attempt to kickstart a Korean film industry that has continued to struggle mightily since the pre-pandemic highs of Bong Joon-ho and Gisaengchung (Parasite)’s unexpected 2020 Academy Award victory.¹ The list of international directors in attendance was indeed impressive, from Michael Mann to Guillermo del Toro to recent Oscar winner Sean Baker, along with a plethora of local actors and directors. And while this seemed to be largely successful, with a record numbers of attendees² and ample local coverage, the quality of the Korean films, especially those world premiering at the festival, was lesser than in most other years. More disappointingly, there were fewer films from first-time directors, which had been a focus of the festival over the past decade. This resulted in an uneven selection of Korean films, despite the organisers’ efforts to bring audiences, per this year’s slogan, “back to cinema.” 

No Other Choice

Busan 2025 opened with, other than Bong Joon-ho, the most famous of Korea’s auteurs, Park Chan-wook, and his latest Eo-jjeol-su-gae-op-da (No Other Choice), which had premiered at Venice two weeks earlier and was released in theatres domestically as BIFF was closing. It was a major coup for the festival, with Park and lead actors Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin in attendance, at once a notable departure from opening films of the past decade as well as a continuation from last year’s selection of Kim Sang-man’s  big budget, nationalistic Netflix action film Jeon, Ran (Uprising, 2024). Over the past few years, the Korean films selected for the opening slot were independents such as Jang Kun-jae’s Han-kuk-i Si-reo-seo (Because I Hate Korea, 2023), Yun Jero’s Beautiful Days (2018), Shin Su-won’s Yu-ri-jeong-won (Glass Garden, 2017), and Zhang Lu’s Chun-mong (A Quiet Dream, 2016), perhaps a luxury for an industry with better prospects and an indication of the difficulty of attracting the bigger-name auteurs to the local circuit. No Other Choice harkens back both to bigger budget Korean films selected as Opening Films in the 2000s, such as Jang Jin’s Gutmoning peurejideonteu (Good Morning President,  2009) and Kim Dae-seung’s Ga-eul-lo (Traces of Love, 2006), as well as films by international auteurs, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Zuìhǎo de Shíguāng (Three Times, 2005) and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004).  The move was mutually beneficial, given the box office struggles, despite positive critical reviews, of Park’s most recent film, He-eo-jil Gyeol-sim (Decision to Leave), and the need for his latest to be commercially successful, both for Park himself and the industry as a whole.³ 

To be sure, No Other Choice does not reach the heights of Park’s best work and will likely disappoint audiences looking for a second Parasite. But as a piece of both national and trans-national cinema, it is quite fascinating. It is an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Ax, which had previously been adapted in 2005 by Costa-Gavras (to whom No Other Choice is dedicated) as Le Couperet (The Ax). Park and writer-director Lee Kyoung-mi began working on the screenplay back in 2009, which was translated from Korean to English with plans to make the film in America (Don McKellar, also worked on the translated script). The project never came to fruition, but eventually Park was able to get local funding to make the film in Korean, working with writer Lee Ja-hye on another version of the script.⁴ Given this backstory, it is surprising how seamlessly Park and his screenwriters make the film fit into the Korean context, from the use of locations and music to the portrayal of the protagonist and what drives him. When Man-soo (Lee Byung-hun)  loses his job, it is not his survival that is threatened, but his status at society’s top. While this dynamic is hardly specific to Korea, it does drive the country’s middle and upper classes to a great extent. This makes the protagonist difficult to sympathize with, and yet, cold as the film may come across, by the end I was moved almost despite myself.  No Other Choice concludes by critiquing A.I. and the damage it will bring, a satire that feels nationally specific, as Korean society is embracing the new technology  with fewer reservations and concerns than most other countries. There is even room to read a meta-critique into the film, with Park hanging on to his auteur status by eliminating other competitors, an interpretation that felt particularly apt given the film’s place at Busan 2025. 

En Route To

One of the edition’s big changes was the creation of a broader Official Competition section to replace the “New Currents” sidebar, which was limited to debut and second films. Ironically, then, the best of the four Korean films in the Competition section were two of the few first features unveiled at Busan this year: Yoo Jae-in’s Ji-u-reo Ga-neun Gil (En Route To) and Han Chang-lok’s Choong-choong-choong (Funky Freaky Freaks).⁵ While neither reaches the heights of the best Busan premieres of the past decade, they make for an interesting double bill of contemporary Korean teenage angst. Of the two, En Route To is the more distinguished. The film takes place at a girls’ school located on the outskirts of Seoul and follows two roommates whose initially tempestuous relationship soon changes as they bond over traumas inflicted by the patriarchy. One of the girls, Yun-ji (Sim Su-bin), has become pregnant by their teacher, a figure we never see, an indication of the director’s desire to focus the story on the two teenagers and their experiences. Su-bin’s roommate, Gyeong-su (Lee Ji-won) ) is the daughter of a single mother herself, and eventually tries to help Yun-ji obtain an abortion and come to terms with their teacher’s immorality. There are some tonal and structural issues, with sequences that threaten to swell the film into a comedic farce and distract from the story’s core, which is the relationship of the female characters (other than the two leads, this extends to the teacher’s wife as well as Gyeong-su’s mother). Still, in a year lacking in discoveries, En Route To remains a promising debut. Arguably less successful, Funky Freaky Freaks nonetheless offers a striking contrast to Yoo’s film; Han’s is a punk vision of teenagers in hell delivered with an aggressive, bombastic style which combines repeated jump cuts, canted angles, and allusions to Scorsese and Godard with the aesthetic of YouTube videos and A.I. deep fakes. It is relentlessly grim, following a trio of alienated friends who plot revenge on a tormentor, but is too trapped within its male protagonist’s perspective, which proves far less interesting to that of his two friends, a gender non-conforming boy and a girl with an eating disorder. Instead, we are subjected to the young man’s Freudian drama, territory that has already been well-covered and to which Han’s film does not offer much insight. But viewers with greater appreciation for the director’s bold approach might view Funky Freaky Freaks more favourably.  

The biggest disappointment this year was the “Vision: Korea” section. Of the 12 films, only one was a feature debut, a problem that the new festival director Jung Han-seok acknowledged in an interview with critic Pierce Conran, stating that there was simply a lack of strong first features to program.⁶ There was also a real gender discrepancy, with only two  entries directed by women. This would not have been as big an issue had the overall quality been better;unfortunately, most of the films were lacklustre and rarely suggested improvements on each director’s earlier work. Granted,  the quality of first film submissions this year might have been low, yet the smaller and less prestigious Jeonju International Film Festival, held in May, unveiled two debut features – Divine Sung’s Ye-reum-ui Ka-ma-ra (Summer’s Camera) and Park Joon-ho’s 3670 – that were superior to any Busan premiere, the first time I can recall this happening. Thus, it does feel like programming might be part of the issue. It also felt very odd to have movies in the Vision section by veteran filmmakers, such as Shin Su-won’s Saram-ui Tan-saeng (The Mutation),her seventh film, and Lee Kwang-kuk’s Dan-jam (Beautiful Dreamer), his fifth. I thought Beautiful Dreamer was one of the section’s stronger titles, a sensitive and sad mediation on grief and the social stigma of suicide in Korea, but it didn’t measure up to Lee’s earlier work and might have been better served in the Competition section, which instead contained two rather subpar entries, Lim Sun-ae’s Sil-yeon-dang-han Sa-ram-deul-eul Hwi-han Il-gop Si Jo-chan-mo-im (Seven O’clock Breakfast Club for the Broken-Hearted) and Lee Jeahan’s Da-reun I-reum-eu ro (By Another Name). This would have opened more space for newer and more diverse voices. 

Coming of Age

The section’s finest, and the entry that delivered on the section’s promise of developing and showcasing young filmmakers, was Cheol-deul Mu-ryeob (Coming of Age), the second feature by Jeong Seung-o, who debuted in 2020 with the acclaimed I-jang (Move the Grave). Taken together, one would probably guess that Coming of Age was Jeong’s first film, with Move the Grave the more commercial follow-up. That is not a criticism; Coming of Age is not as tightly structured nor as consistently entertaining as Move the Grave, but for all its narrative lapses, it is arguably the deeper and more resonant work. The plot centres around a struggling young actress (she is an extra in the fictional yet highly plausible Korean drama “Joseon Ghost Berzerker”), who must care for her ailing father, whom her mother left years earlier. There is also her grandmother’s upcoming 90th birthday, over which family tensions arise. Jeong employs a rather ambitious narrative form, complete with chapter headings and archival footage from Korea’s traumatic history. This is to both link the characters with the country’s past and put their struggles into perspective, for as difficult as they are, they are far less dire than the Korean War or the pro-democracy battles of the 1980s. While I admire the desire to experiment with storytelling, I felt this took away from Jeong’s main strength, which is his character building and ability to authentically depict family relationships. Probably the best sequence involves the daughter having to nurse her father at the hospital, an experience many Koreans will end up enduring in their lifetime. The acting is strong across the board, with long-time Hong Sang-soo veteran Ki Ju-bong as the father and Yang Mal-bok as the mother. Yang starred in one of the best Korean premieres of the decade, Kim Se-in’s Gat-eun Sog-ot-eul Ip-neun Du Yeoja (The Apartment with Two Women), and she is a powerful screen presence, so compelling here, in fact, that one wishes her role was more substantial. Coming of Age testifies to Jeong’s ability to portray Korean family dynamics and elicit great performances, all while showing a willingness to branch into more challenging storytelling modes; he is clearly one of the more intriguing directors to watch going forward. 

I will conclude with a film that is not necessarily great or maybe even good, yet probably best reflects this year’s edition and its anxieties and contradictions: Kim Dong-ho’s Mi-seu-teo Kim Yeong-hwa-gwan-ae Ga-da (Mr. Kim Goes to the Cinema), the first feature film by the 88-year-old Kim, one of BIFF’s founders and its former chairman. The film follows Kim as he travels to cinemas all over the world, including foreign locales such as Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam, as well as small independent theatres across Korea. Interspersing the journeys is a massive number of short interviews with filmmakers and performers: foreign cineastes like Johnnie To,the Dardenne Brothers andTsai Ming-liang, as well as many big names from the domestic scene (Bong Joon-ho, Lee Chang-dong, Lee Jung-jae, Jeon Do-yeon). Since the large number of voices tend to reiterate similar things about the importance of the theatrical experience, the film winds up feeling  repetitive. Yet it felt like  the perfect summation of Busan 2025, with the big names – both foreign and domestic – dominating the running time, and a few  independent directors such as Yoon Dan-bi and Yoon Ga-eun squeezed in towards the end, as well as footage of a graduation ceremony at the Korean Academy of Film Art (KAFA). The same festive mood was felt throughout the festival, as BIFF threw a large-scale 30th anniversary celebration of cinema-going, all while acknowledging  the crisis the domestic industry was facing. However, Busan placed more emphasis on looking back to the past rather than the future. Perhaps it had no other choice. 

Busan International Film Festival
September 17-26, 2025
https://www.biff.kr/eng/

Endnotes