Seoul Film Festival Opens in New Guise

The seventh Seoul Film Festival opened on Friday at Seoul Art Cinema and Sponge House. The festival has been held under the name of Seoul Net Festival: SeNef, but it changes its name from this year and starts all over, bringing together 143 films from 30 countries. It ends on Sept. 17.

Among the 143 movies, "Iklimler (Les Climats)", the opening film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is filmed with an HD camera and attracted attention for a Turkish movie 20 years after Yilmaz Guney did the same with "Yol" in the early 80s. Ceylan was awarded the Cannes Festival's Grand Jury Prize for his 2003 film "Uzak". In other highlights, the Asia in Focus section is screening Filipino movie "Ebolusyon ng isang pamilyang Pilipino" or "The Evolution of a Filipino Family". With a running time of 10-and-a-half hours, the screening easily breaks the record for the longest movie shown here, held by the seven-hour-18-minute movie "Satantango" screened at the 2000 Jeonju International Film Festival.

There are also new offerings from the masters, with Abel Ferrara's "Mary", Alexander Sokurov's "The Sun" and Claude Chabrol's "Comedy of Power". The SeNefia06 section for international competition has invited 12 films, and the First Cut for domestic competition five films directed by new faces.

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