KOREA FILM TOUR IN CROATIA 2014

While Ki-duk Kim spent his lonely days on the hidden mountain, documenting his adventure in 'Arirang', the other great Korean directors such as Chan-wook Park ('Stalker'), Joon-ho Bong ('Snowpiercer') and Jee-woon Kim ('The Last Stand') have chosen migration instead of isolation. After they became famous on the global festival scene, it was a matter of time when Hollywood would recognize their vitality. Only the traditionalist Kwon-taek Im and modernist Sang-soo Hong, remained faithful to ther own poetics. If the West is present in Hong films, it would never be Hollywood but Paris as the hommage to Jean Eustache ('Night and Day') or France which is incarnated in the shape of the tourist Isabelle Huppert ('In Another Country'). Our Korea Film Tour 2014. is focused mostly on unknown figures in genre film mainstream, although their films became a huge commercial success and box office hits. In his adaptation of a webcomic designed by Jong-hun Choi, which became very popular among the Korean teenagers, Cheol-soo Jang ('Secretly Greatly'), whose impressive previous horror 'Bedevilled' is well known to our festival audience, still shows a keen feel for location, although the isolated island is substituted for the isolated neighbourhood with its narrow streets, where his top North Korean operative undercover awaits his commands, playing a village idiot. A fabulous Chan-ik Lim ('Officer of the Year') follows the great tradition of Korean police action comedies. And the very funny Si-heup Seong ('The Plan Man') combines rom com with bizarre gags in the story of obsessive compulsive man and the musician, in which perverse order collides with chaos. (Dragan Rubeša)