Busan Film Festival To Open Again After Two Years Of Freedom Dispute

The Busan Film Festival will open on Thursday together with the local film scene after two years of dispute over the festival's artistic freedom.

The run through of the festival will be on next Saturday. It will feature 299 film entries from 69 countries all over the world. Last year's record was greater compared to this year with 304 films from 75 countries.

Asia's largest film festival will open in this southern South Korean city of Busan Thursday with the local film scene remaining divided after a two-year-long dispute over the festival's artistic freedom.

Zhang Lu, the Korean-Chinese director of the film "A Quiet Dream," will be leading the 299 titles. The film depicts a story of a young Korean woman who owns a bar and takes care of her paralyzed father while three men seek to tie the knot with her. The film will be the first Korean opening film in the Busan Festival after the romance film "Always" in 2011 by Song Il-gon opened the festival.

"Daguerrotype" by Kiyoshi Kurosawa,"Bleed for This" by Ben Younger, "Rage" by Lee Sang-il, and "Your Name" by Makoto Shinkai are the movies listed in the Gala Presentation section and these are the works from contemporary master directors from different countries.

For the "News currents" sections for up-and-coming Asian directors, a total of 11 films from 10 countries including Indian director Padmakumar Narasimhamurthy's "A Billion Colour Story" and "In Between Seasons" by South Korea's Lee Dong-eun will be on the competition.

The Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) and the Busan metropolitan government had been in a conflict in the so-called "municipal interference" when Lee Yong-kwan, the executive director of BIFF, continued the screening of a controversial documentary despite of the opposition of the mayor of Busan and the organizing committee chairman of BIFF, Suh Byung-soo. The half of the annual budget of the festival was funded by the city of Busan.  

Because of the dispute regarding the film, Lee decided to leave his position. In 2015, an iconic actress, Kang Soo-hyun became the co-executive director in the festival.

Meanwhile, the hit movies like "Train to Busan" and "Tunnel" were not included on the list because the Lee Dong-ha, a former chief producer and Kim Seong-hun, the latter director, are members of the Producers' Guild of Korea (PGK) and Directors' Guild of Korea (DGK), which are not participating groups in this year's festival.

"We decided not to submit our films to the festival without any apology from the Busan mayor and measures to restore the former festival director Lee Yong-kwan's disgraced honor," an official of Redpeter Co., the studio behind "Train to Busan," told Yonhap News Agency.

The two popular films garnered about 11.5 million and 6.5 million viewers in South Korea this year.

Moreover, acclaimed Asian movie directors who are coming to Busan are Japan's Hirokazu Koreeda and Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien. Both of them will attend a panel discussion session on the Asian film industries together with South Korean director, Lee Chang-dong.

The film about an innocent love, traditional values and conflicting religious beliefs entitled "The Dark Wind" by Iraqi director Hussein Hassan will close the festival.