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Film Festivals
Korean Film Festival LA
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- Published on Tuesday, 02 March 2010 08:08
- Written by Lynne Shannon
As the biggest Korean film festival in the United States, The Korean Film Festival in Los Angeles 
(KOFFLA) is being held March 4-7, 2010 at The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and the Laemmle Music Hall, among other venues in Los Angeles, California.
KOFFLA’s main purpose is to introduce Korean films to avid film lovers and the industry alike. It aims not only to bridge the gap between Hollywood and Korea but also between Korea and the Korean-American community through the medium of film and visual arts.
Over 70 films are screening, with In-competition films being judged by a select jury board consisting of industry professionals and prominent figures in the Korean community.
Hosting the 2010 KOFFLA is Korean director Chang-Wha Chung, one of the first to introduce martial arts films to the U.S. through his film Five Fingers of Death, which helped light the kung fu movie explosion in the early 1970s.
This year’s spokesperson for the Festival is famed actor John Cho (Star Trek, the Harold and Kumar films, TV’s FlashForward). 
Opening Night Film is Le Grand Chef II: Kimchi War , about two chefs who compete for bragging rights as "Kimchi-originator" and the future of a family restaurant. Directed by Baek Dong-hoon, the film stars Kim Jeong Eun (Lover in Paris) and Jin Goo (Mother), who are appearing with the director at the screening. A KOFFLA representative states, “[We] specifically chose this film to launch the festival because of what it symbolizes to the Korean community. Kimchi represents the specialty of the country and the feelings and sensitivity of a Korean.”
The Closing Night film is A Good Rain Knows, directed by Heo Jin-Ho, about two former students who meet later and discover the romantic connection they had not realized before.
Korean features include:
Memories of Murder / Salinui chueok, directed by Bong Joon-ho (Mother), starring Song Kang-ho (The Host, Lady Vengeance, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) and Kim Sang-kyung (May 18, The World of Silence) is based on a true story about two brutal and stupid local detectives who try to solve serial murders of young women.
White Night / Baek-ya-haeng, directed by Park Shin-Woo starring Han Suk-Kyu (The President's Last Bang), Son Ye-Jin, Ko Su and Lee Min-Jung. A long forgotten case reveals a hidden relation
ship between a victim's son and the neighborhood woman's daughter.
The Righteous Thief (aka Descendants of Hong Gil-dong) / Hong-gil-dong-eui Hoo-ye, directed by Jeong Yong-Ki (The Doll Master), starring Lee Beom-Soo, Kim Soo-Ro, Seong Dong-Il and Lee Si-Yeong, is a Robin Hood tale about a family who schemes to fight against corrupt business moguls.
Make Yourself At Home (aka Fetish) directed by Soopum Sohn, starring Song Hye-Kyo and Arno Frisch. A young woman marries and moves to New Jersey to avoid the power of shamanism—but Fate knows no borders. The director will be present.
Films by first-time directors include:
Daytime Drinking / Naj sul, by Noh Young-Suk. A young man who just broke up with his girlfriend only wants to drink and winds up on a road trip that makes a hangover from hell seem good. The director will be present.
Members of the Funeral / Jang-rae-sig-ui member by Baek Seung-Bin. The suicide of a 17-year-old dislodges secrets and hidden feelings in a dysfunctional family.
Rough Cut / Yeong-hwa-neun Yeong-hwa-da, directed by Jang Hoon, starring Hong Su-hyeon (Bungee Jumping of Their Own) and Kang Ji-Hwan (Host and Guest). A gangster-turned-actor does a film with an actor (who is practically a gangster), with the only condition that the violence portrayed in the movie has to be real. 
Tokyo Taxi / Dokyo taekshi, directed by Kim Tai-sik. In this lighter side of road trips, a lead in a Japanese band must get to a gig in Seoul but he's afraid to fly, so he decides to take a taxi. The director will be present.
Korean-American features include:
God is D_ad, directed by Abraham Lim, starring Cy Shim, Carlo Corbellini, Lauren Mayer, Elvis Garcia, Derek Hicks, Davis Choh and Brett Emanuel. Another road trip movie, as strangers are bound for Chicago. But this one asks: are we bound by free-will, an omniscient God or the roll of the Dungeon Master's dice? The director will be present.
Munyurangabo, directed by Lee Isaac Chung. An orphan of the Rwandan genocide travels from Kigali to the countryside on a quest for justice.
Numerous short films are also being screened.
Other events include
Actorfest KOFFLA, at the Korean Cultural Center
Master Class at American Film Institute with cinematographer Kim Hyung-ku (The Host, Please Teach Me English, Memories of Murder)
a Surprise Screening on Friday, March 4
KOFFLA was first launched in 2007 by the Korean Film Council (KOFIC). Beginning in 2010, KOFFLA will re-emerge under the Korean Cinematheque, a non-profit organization that helps to bridge the gap between Hollywood and the Korean film industry as well as the Korean and the Korean-American community through the medium of film and visual arts.
For more information, visit www.koffla.org.
Korean Film Festival in Los Angeles
March 4-7th, 2010
Egyptian Theatre
6712 Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA
Laemmle Music Hall 3
9036 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA
AFI Conservatory - Mark Goodson Screening Room
2021 N. Western Avenue,
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Korean Cultural Center - Ari Hall
5505 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Thessaloninki Documentary Festival Seeks Action
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Previews
- Published on Monday, 01 March 2010 13:06
- Written by Laura Blum
If the poster for the 12th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival says anything with its splat
ter of bullets, it's: "Caution! Powerful films ahead." No reel or celluloid cliché dulls the image of what to expect March 12–21, 2010, in Greece's second largest city.
Though less established than the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2009, TFD has earned its programming cred.
For artistic director Dmitri Eipedes, the Festival has been "a bet." The risk-happy curator "really wanted to see the level of popularity of documentary, an art form that informs as well as entertains."
With annual crowds of more than 65,000, forefront recognition in Europe and commercial success for the art form, odds are looking good. Yet the big win for Eipedes – who fled dictatorship and only returned to a democratic Greece decades later – is showing "that documentary can make us better, thinking citizens.”
The Festival's subtitle is "Images of the 21st Century," with the tacit understanding that seeing current history propels doing. Audiences will have 170 films to spur them to action.
Take for example The Mermaid's Tears: Oceans of Plastic, by French filmmaker Sandrine Feydel. Audiences will learn about the Hazmat heap that has become Earth's oceans, and — the Aegean Sea-flanked festival hopes — will take up the cause. (The Aegean is the focus of a Greek tribute that carries late filmmaker Yiorgos Kolozis's Aegean Nin kai Ai trilogy, but I digress.)
Feydel's film will screen under "Planet in Peril," a new section that aims to pick up where the Copenhagen summit on climate change left off. Its confab, "The Earth After Copenhagen," tables as one of its talking points, "What role could organized social groups, non-governmental organizations, artistic creation and the documentary play towards (redressing global warming)?"
Mobilizing advocacy also appears a goal of such "Human Rights" section entries as The Five Cardinal Points, by Austrian director Fridolin Schönwiese. Globalization and sugarcane companies are the villains in this story of Tres Valles, Mexico, which went from prosperous farming community to destitute village whose families now seek legal or illegal work in the U.S. Another "Human Rights" selection, Dirk Simon's When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun, enlists the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and the music of Philip Glass, Damian Rice and Radiohead's Thom Yorke to chart Tibet's quest for freedom.
Women's power, as embodied in the lives of a Kenyan attorney, a South African school principal and a Zimbabwean housewife/entrepreneur, fuels Africa is a Woman's Name. The three women of ranging social strata narrate how they transformed their immediate worlds. Made by Ingrid Sinclair, Bridget Pickering and Wanjiru Kinyanjui, the "African Stories" pick echoes a broader Festival theme of human resourcefulness in surmounting private or shared hells.
It also joins two other portraits of trios, Winds of Sand, Women of Rock (also an "African Stories" entry) and Meet Me at the Mango Tree ("Views of the World"). The former, by Austria's Nathalie Borgers, follows three women of the Saharan Tubu tribe on a 930-mile date-picking mission across the Sahara desert, their yearly break from domestic drudgery and macho husbands. In the latter film, U.S. filmmaker Brian McKenzie gives a male variation of the three-tiered approach by trailing a coconut gatherer, an ironing man and a TV repairman in Tamil Nadu, India.
The "Portraits – Human Journeys" section will present the world premiere of Baktash Abtin's Park Mark, chronicling a night in the life of a former family man and wealthy U.S. resident who's now a homeless drug addict in Teheran. Like The Five Cardinal Points, When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun, Africa is a Woman's Name and five other films, it receives its world premiere at TDF.
European premieres include Coming Back for More, Willem Alkema's update of elusive Sly and the Family Stone frontman Sly Stone; About Face, an adult's attempt to grapple with severe childhood trauma, by Mary Rosanne Katzke.
This year's Festival pays homage to Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens through a retrospective reaching back to the 1920s. A highlight is The Spanish Earth, which is narrated by Ernest Hemingway and considered one of the premier documentaries on the Spanish Civil War.
Another tribute, to Krysztof Kieslowski, is part of a larger spotlight on Polish nonfiction film. Though largely known for his dramatic productions, Kieslowski documented political unrest in Poland of the 1960s and the 1970s with a rebel's nerve for social critique. The tribute's 18 films fold in the completed version of The Legend, about Polish writer Stefan Zeromski; From the City of Lódz, the director’s graduation project for film school; and interviews with workers that yield his most political film, Workers’71.
Accompanying the Festival is the International Doc Market, run by Greek National Television and the Media Program of the European Union. This year, 50 of its 450 titles will be available via an online library in 30 digital booths, dispensing of DVD and VHS formats entirely. Doc Market takes place in the Electra Palace Hotel, next to Festival headquarters — and flagship Olympion and Pavlos Zannas theaters — in Aristotelous Square.
The European Documentary Network, for its part, operates a pitching forum at TDF that draws financiers and commissioning editors from around the globe. A parallel event, "Just Talking," brings together filmmakers and industry professionals in chats that ideally lead to more than its title suggests — and on to collaboration.
Exhibitions, masterclasses, publications, concerts and parties punch up the Salonica agenda, capped by an awards ceremony. Amnesty International and FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) are two of the prize givers; the Hellenic Red Cross is another, and three of its six Audience Awards bear cash gifts of 10,000 euros each.
Yet even non-filmmakers can expect to come away with riches from Greek Macedonia's pulsing metropolitan city and its Festival a plate's toss from the wharf.
Additional details are available at www.filmfestival.gr
Thessaloniki Documentary Festival
9 Alexandras Avenue
11473, Athens, Greece
+30 210 870 6000
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Miami International Film Festival Shoots for High Marks
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- Category: Previews
- Published on Saturday, 27 February 2010 04:26
- Written by Laura Blum
Rotterdam @ BAM Brings Best of Fest to Brooklyn
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Previews
- Published on Monday, 22 February 2010 20:27
- Written by Laura Blum
Rap music and urban renewal aren't the only things Brooklyn, New York, and the Dutch city of Rotterdam have in common. Both advance a version of the Rotterdam film festival.
On March 3-9, 2010, a month after curtains closed at the 39th International Film Festival Rotterdam (January 27—February 7), the Brooklyn Academy of Music rolls out Rotterdam @ BAM. The stateside series reprises 14 features and shorts from IFFR’s Tiger Award competition sponsored by the Dutch public television network VPRO.
For Florence Almozini, program director of BAMcinématek, the week-long showcase is a chance to tap into the "bold artistic vision" of IFFR, which launches emerging independent and experimental work, including art exhibitions and live performances. One of the largest film festivals in the world, IFFR is notched among Europe's finest — Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Locarno.
Nearly all of the films at BAM will receive their New York premieres, with some also debuting in the US and North America.
The opening-night selection is the US premiere of Alamar, marking documentary filmmaker Pedro González-Rubio's first plunge into the narrative feature depths. Also shot (largely underwater) by González-Rubio, the film probes the relationship between a father and son vacationing off the coast of Mexico before the latter moves to Rome to live with his mother.
Following the premiere, an invitation-only affair, will be a reception for filmmakers, festival organizers and industry professionals. Civilians can catch Alamar on March 4 at BAM and subsequently in theaters.
Anocha Suwichakornpong's Mundane History brings a bit of Thailand to Brooklyn. Continuing the father-son motif, this philosophical and political musing takes on the unsteady relationship between an elusive man and his invalid kid, inviting into the breach a new caretaker and a post-rock Asian soundtrack.
Cold Water of the Sea (Aqua fría de mar), by Costa Rican filmmaker Paz Fábrega, is another Tiger Award-winner having its U.S. premiere at BAM. Like Alamar, it finds its Latino protagonists on holiday by the sea, only this time the lens trails a young woman grappling with her confined life through the prism of a runaway girl. The film has its North American premiere on March 6.
Rotterdam @ BAM braves the first partnership between a European festival and an American film house. Yet it's hardly BAMcinématek’s maiden collaboration; the successes of "Sundance Institute at BAM" and "Directors’ Fortnight at 40" provided inspiration.
The transatlantic series encompasses industry screenings and events, reaching out beyond the usual BAMcinématek crowd to target distributors, sales agents and other film professionals.
Narrowed from IFFR's 250 feature films and 450 shorts, the lineup takes to heart the Renaissance-era adage, "We cannot all do everything." Can it be any coincidence that this wisdom was authored by Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam?
Rotterdam @ BAM feature films:
Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio, Mexico)
Autumn Adagio (Tsuki Inoue, Japan)
C'est déjà l'été (Martijn Maria Smits, The Netherlands/Belgium)
Cold Water of the Sea (Paz Fábrega
Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell, U.S./Suriname)
Mama (Yelena & Nikolay Renard, Russia)
Miyoko (Tsubota Yoshifumi, Japan)
Mundane History (Anocha Suwichakornpong, Thailand)
My Daughter (Charlotte Lay Kuen Lim, Malaysia)
R (Michael Noer & Tobias Lindholm, Denmark)
Street Days (Levan Koguashvili, Georgia)
Sun Spots (Yang Heng, Hong Kong/China)
The Temptation of St. Tony (Veiko Õunpuu, Estonia/Sweden/Finland)
La vie au Ranch (Sophie Letourneur, France)
BAM Rose Cinemas
Peter Jay Sharp Building
30 Lafayette Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11217
718.636.4100
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www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=1948
