The filmmaker of Pepe, the recipient of the Silver Bear for Best Director at Berlinale 2024, shared concerns at the award ceremony regarding the prevalent Eurocentricity in film festivals. The current edition of the JEONJU International Film Festival invites Pepe and, at the same time, aims to extend the significance of his words to broader geographic contexts. My take on his words is that one mission of film festivals is to disinter film projects outside of the comfort zone, such as trends, filmmaking procedures, production methods, and cinematic formats.
This section, entitled Expanded Cinema, is a program aimed at taking a peek at what is beyond the boundaries. This year, in particular, we sought to bring our attention to the filmmakers based in places somewhat less frequently represented in film festivals and those who refuse to be constrained by institutional measures. More importantly, as we live in a world where audiovisual media and even filmmaking are in the hands of machines and artificial intelligence, we strive to look for projects that actively take advantage of novel and even futuristic technologies to generate images and stories.
Films presented in this section signal that we can go beyond the rigid and highly formulated grammar of the mainstream film industry and platforms. Additionally, they prove that personal stories closely connected to the filmmakers are naturally the most pioneering cinema. Documentary films Nowhere Near and Dust take stories of the family to the screen. The Garden Cadences, a Few Mornings, an Evening, and Dreaming Dogs talk about small communities surviving pressures from chaotic world. Pepe, you burn me, He Who Dances Passes, The Rim, and Tale of Shepherds shines with unique vision, intersecting fiction and documentaries, taking elements from various forms of cinema.
Also notable is the title, Incident (2023), a new short directed by Bill MORRISON, a master of found footage filmmaking. This documentary reconstructs the 2018 police shooting in Chicago. By putting together images from surveillance cameras, security cameras, police body cameras, and dashboard cameras, it recounts the incident and its aftermath. The power of real-time videos and the directorial skills, especially his frame setting and masterful scene constructions, create an unforgettable sense of urgency.
The shorts follow the same goals and seek to understand creative cinematic endeavors coming from places that are geographically far apart from JEONJU IFF. We hope the audience does not leave them unattended. I hope this section expands the possibility that we might dwell in a world of cinema that we have never inhabited before.
Programmer Sung MOON
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