By Lee Hwan-hee
Staff Reporter
A retrospective honoring the late Taiwanese director Edward Yang will be held at next month's 2007 Pusan International Film Festival. The complete lineup was also announced Tuesday.
While the deaths of film directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman were covered widely, another master who passed away this year, with less recognition, was Taiwanese director Edward Yang, who died last June at age 59.
Along with fellow directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, Yang helped to turn Taiwanese film into the most critically acclaimed national cinema of the past 20 years or so, which some consider to be on par with the French New Wave or the classical Japanese cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa. This retrospective will be the first time where all of his 8 films are shown.
"A Brighter Summer Day", widely thought to be his masterpiece, comparable to Hou's greatest, "City of Sadness", has rarely been shown due to various copyright issues and it is not to be missed. Yang's best-known film is "Yi Yi", about lives in contemporary Taiwan. It won him the best director award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
Hou Hsiao-hsien is also represented at this year's festival, with "Flight of the Red Balloon", which marks the Taiwanese director's first film made in the West, as it was shot in France and stars French actress Juliette Binoche.
Entries from other notable directors include Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang's "Ploy", which is the director's first film since 2006's "Invisible Waves", for which Korean actress Kang Hye-jeong played a part, and Shinji Aoyama's "Sad Vacation", with Tadanobu Asano, who starred in "Waves".
A conspicuous trend in this year's lineup is the presence of omnibus films. "The State of the World", boasts short films by Chantal Akerman, Pedro Costa and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others, and "To Each His Cinema", is directed by 35 luminaries, including Manoel de Oliveira, Theo Angelopoulos, the Dardenne brothers, Takeshi Kitano, Wim Wenders and Abbas Kiarostami.
Kiarostami is included in another anthology film called "Persian Carpet", from Iran and another notable Iranian film to be shown is "Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame", by Hana Makhmalbaf, who is the youngest daughter of the distinguished director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Her sister, Samira, is also a well-known director.
Korean cinema is well represented in the festival, if predictably so. Veteran Im Kwon-taek's "Beyond the Years", the sequel to his "Sopyonje", will be shown, as will Kim Ki-duk's "Breath". Im Sang-soo's "The Old Garden", based on the novel of the same name by Hwang Seok-yong, will be shown, as well as Lee Chang-dong's "Secret Sunshine", which won its lead actress, Jeon Do-yeon, the best actress award at this year's Cannes Film Festival.
But the above works have already been shown in theaters in Korea, and at other film festivals around the world, and, fortunately, it won't be the case with Lee Myung-se's "M", which will have its Korean premiere after the screening at the festival.
Korean director with probably the highest international repute, Hong Sang-soo, also has a new film, called "Night and Day", but it will be screened only for Asian Film Market, a separate event within the festival reserved for international film distributors.
The festival will open with Feng Xiaogang's commercially-oriented war film "Assembly", perhaps in response to the last year's selection, Hou Hsiao-hsien's austere film "Three Times".
2007 Pusan International Film Festival will last from Oct. 4 through 12. It will feature 275 films from 64 countries. For ticketing and other information visit Open the link.
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