The summer blockbuster season is wrapping up, and now comes the festival and awards
season.
This week, the Venice International Film Festival will kick off -- that's where Korean films
have done well over the years.
And this year,... a trio of Korean films are screening.
For more, we are joined by film critic Pierce Conran.
Venice is one of the biggest festivals, also one of the oldest.
It's of course a huge honor have a film screened there?
Indeed, Venice held its 70th edition last year and is considered on the most important
festivals in the world, often grouped together with the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals.
Venice tends to insist on world premieres and getting a selection there signals global
recognition.
Though Toronto, which kicks off a week later, has grown a lot in recent years, Venice is
also the start of Oscar season, where many Academy Award contenders make their debuts.
For example, the festival kicked off on Wednesday with opening film Birdman, from director Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu and starring Michael Keaton, which instantly became a big contender for
the Awards circuit.
And what about Korean films?
Have many broken out after screening in Venice?
Actually Venice has been very kind to Korean films over the years.
The first major award for a Korean film was Kang Soo-yeon's Best Actress win for Im Kwon-taek's
The Surrogate Woman in 1987.
Other big prizes include Moon So-ri Marcello Mastroianni Award for Rising Star in 2002
for Lee Chang-dong's Oasis and Kim Ki-duk's Best Director win for 3-Iron in 2004, not
to mention his Golden Lion prize two years ago.
Good achievements.
So what about this year?
Any films we should be on the look out for?
A trio of new works from some of Korea's biggest directors.
Actually, many of those participating this year have won awards before.
Im Kwon-taek is back with Revivre his 102nd film, and first and four years.
Hong Sangsoo is presenting is 16th feature Hill of Freedom, which features award-winner
Moon So-ri.
And of course Kim Ki-duk is back for the third year in a row with his latest film One on
One, which was the opening film for Venice Days, one of the festival's major sidebars.
What can you tell us about these films?
Im's Revivre, which is a French word that means 'to live again', features veteran star
Ahn Sung-ki, who plays a middle-aged man that embarks on an affair with
a younger woman while his wife lays sick in bed.
Compared to
the majority of Im's films in the last few decades, which often deal with history and
national culture, Revivre appears to be a much more personal work.
Hill of Freedom sees Moon So-ri, who frequently works with Hong, team up with Japanese star
Ryu Kase, who plays a Japanese man who travels to Korea to reconnect with an old flame and
meets various people on the way.
Hong's films have been getting shorter in recent years but Hill of Freedom, at a mere
67 minutes, appears to be his shortest yet.
Kim's One on One was actually submitted to Cannes, and though it didn't make the cut,
the film screened theatrically in Korea in May.
However it has been recut for an international audience.
The film is a revenge thriller that sees a group of vigilantes who go about torturing
people to exact their revenge.
So those are the big three?
They're certainly big ones but there's plenty more going to Toronto , which I'll take a
look at next week.
The Busan Film Festival will also be revealing its schedule on Tuesday.
One a side note, Bong Joon Ho's Snowpiercer became the first film to enter the Academy
Awards race this week as US distributor TWC-Radius began to mail out screeners of the film to
Academy voters, an earlier than usual start to the annual Road to the Oscars.