38th Busan International Short Film Festival – Opening Films

By Asian Film Festival on April 2, 2021 • ( Leave a comment )

Three short films will open activities for the 38th Busan International Short Film Festival which will take place from April 21st – 26th, 2021 in Busan, Korea.

The opening ceremony will take place on April 21st (Wed) at 19:00 pm at the Busan Cinema Center. Two Korean and one Netherlands short will open activities for the festival. All of these films represent this year’s festival theme ‘State of Exception’ with their respective gaze and direction.

**Opera** by Erick Oh – Korea | 2020 – 9 minutes

In a very literal example of world-building, this jaw-dropping animated short film presents an oligarchic society as a multi-layered, interconnected, pyramidal machine which runs on a never-ending cycle of order and chaos. Because of the way that film is constructed, not two audience members will actually be watching the same details nor characters – allowing for potentially infinite viewings and interpretations. (BISFF 2021)

About the director:
Erick Oh is a Korean filmmaker and artist based in California, USA. With his background in fine art in Seoul National University, Korea and film at UCLA, USA. Erick became an animator at Pixar Animation Studios from 2010 to 2016. Then Erick joined Tonko House with his fellow former Pixar artists and directed ≪PIG: The DamKeeper Poems≫(2018) which won the Crystal Award at 2018 Annecy International Animation Film Festival. He is currently working on a variety of projects with his partners in film/animation, VR/AR industry and also contemporary art scene in USA and Korea.

Teaser:

**Ontact** by Kim Junginn – Korea | 2021 – 30 minutes

The story revolves around a man who is in crisis because he has lost his ability to speak as a result of a state of exception caused by COVID-19. The film asks the question of how a vulnerable individual will survive in a world contaminated with an infectious virus and in which our language, the most important medium for people to communicate, has vanished. In a paradoxical way, the film reminds us of the value of language by illustrating how its loss can have catastrophic results. (BISFF 2021)

About the director:
Born in Busan in 1994, Kim Junginn graduated from Korea University of Media Arts with a degree in film. Her first short film was titled ≪Teacup≫(2015). Since then, she received funding from the Korean Film Council to produce ≪Who Stole My Milk?≫(2017), which was screened at the 2018 Shinfilm Art Film Festival and the 2019 Seoul Guro International Kids Film Festival.

**Lost on Arrival** by Polak Van Bekkum – The Netherlands | 2020 – 8 minutes

A man chooses to live his post-retirement years on a remote Caribbean island. However, he starts to show symptoms of dementia shortly after his arrival, gradually losing his memory and self-confidence. This work portrays the disappearance of life and memory in an extremely minimalist way. (BISFF 2021)

About the Director:

PolakVanBekkum’s (Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum) work is about movement and landscape. ≪Lost on Arrival≫(2020) is a new step in their line of work. Over the years, they developed a cinematographic method for synchronizing audio recordings with mapped routes, thus realizing documentaries based on movement. This allowed them to create films that proceed within projected satellite images from Google Earth. Their earlier films, ≪A Collision of Sorts≫(2017), ≪Go Move Be≫(2018), and ≪The Ride≫(2019) were shown internationally.

For more information about the festival please go to: http://bisff.org