hankyoreh

Stephen Cremin, reporter for Screen International

One week after the Pusan International Film Festival, I was approached by a well-known Korean film director. He wanted to know whether Chinese director Cui Zi'en was really an internationally important director and, if so, why. Cui had been the focus of Pusan's "Remapping of Asian Auteur Cinema" program, which screened three of his films. The award-winning Korean director was chastising himself for not understanding what exactly made gay indie director Cui so great.

Festivals are just one in a number of forces attempting to write the history of Asian cinema; others include film critics, awards ceremonies, and the commercial market. As the dominant film festival in Asia, Pusan plays a particularly important role in determining what Asian films screen across the world. If Europeans and Americans travel to just one film event in Asia each year, it's probably to Pusan. It's the one week of the year when these critics will prioritize Asian film viewing, assuming they have time among the smorgasbord of events that overshadow the film screenings themselves.

Pusan is not the only event staking a claim to Asian film's legacy. Last year, the Venice Film Festival showed Chinese and Japanese films under the banner of "The Secret History of Asian Cinema." The 15 Chinese and 37 Japanese features presented included the most representative works of Asia's best-documented directors, including King Hu, Zhang Yuan, Mizoguchi Kenji, and Suzuki Seijun, among the defined canon of Asian film history.

This month, at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece, there is a program of 22 Mainland Chinese features in a retrospective entitled "New Cinema from China: Another View." The catalogue introduction describes the selection as "a snapshot of a type of Mainland Chinese cinema that is hardly known in the West," and the programming includes accessible, non-exoticized films from the past 10 years. The season includes romantic comedies, road movies and psychological thrillers alongside melodramatic historical epics and disaster movies.

Only three of the films playing Thessaloniki have screened at the Pusan International Film Festival: Zhang Yuan's "I Love You," Li Shaohong's "Baober in Love," and Ning Hao's "Crazy Stone." Out of 22 features, only "Baober" has played at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. It is tempting - but wrong - to assume that the Thessaloniki program is a European perspective on Chinese cinema, whereas Hong Kong and Pusan represent an Asian perspective.

The Chinese films that play at film festivals in Asia tend to follow a European art house aesthetic: the acceptable face of Asian cinema as defined by European festivals including Berlin, Cannes, and Venice as well as Rotterdam, Karlovy Vary, San Sebastian, and Locarno. The underground Chinese films that typically play at festivals are not a response to repression at home but a response to an overseas market for such films. They are films essentially made for Pusan's New Currents section and Cannes' Critics' Week.

This year's Pusan festival closed with a screening of Ning Hao's caper comedy "Crazy Stone." The film, with a young director, an unknown cast, and a low budget has become a talking point in China as a potential new direction for domestic cinema. It was an unusual choice to close the Pusan event, the first time the festival has shown such a commercial film from China. It would be exciting if Pusan could use its powerful position to document a unique perspective on neighboring cinemas, rather than merely reinforce a Western one.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]