The festival opted for heightened safety precautions and yesterday’s awards ceremony was held without any audience in attendance and broadcast live on YouTube. Although, of course we will have to wait and see a few more days. Thankfully, everyone that had close contact with them tested negative so there was no spread from the festival itself. And we had one member of an outside lighting team that was confirmed with Covid-19. “We had one audience member who came to the cinema and then a couple days later found out one of their parents was infected. “South Korea has incredibly good contact tracing capabilities,” Shin continued. The staff tests themselves every morning before work. “We had 7,000 kits on hand and – unlike others I’ve seen – they give results in two to three minutes,” he said. “We knew it would be virtually impossible for confirmed cases not to pass through at all, so we prepared accordingly.”īifan had Covid-19 self-testing kit stations at Bucheon City Hall and at the CGV theatres. “We had forecast the possibility so only had to cancel one or two post-screening Q&As that would have gone on after 10pm,” said Bifan festival director Shin Chul, speaking to Screen. The festival, held in a satellite city west of Seoul, had planned ahead and was able to adapt quickly. With a recent rise in Covid-19 cases to above 1,000 per day, South Korea implemented its strictest social distancing measures from July 12 in Seoul and the capital’s surrounding areas for at least two weeks. The second hybrid edition of Bifan since the outbreak of the pandemic wrapped its physical screenings yesterday (July 15) but will continue to offer virtual screenings on local platform wavve. About a spirit at a dinner feast, who intervenes when nature is savaged by industrial greed, its craftsmanship is superb, and its characters are drawn with haiku-like precision.” The festival’s best director award went to Lee Haven Jones’s UK horror The Feast, which the jury said is “an absolutely assured debut feature, in Welsh. South Korean sales company Finecut handles the feature and recently announced a raft of distribution deals for Asia and Europe. It’s painful to watch the unhappiness of women crushed by unfair sins and curses, and the varied and colourful hellscape that blows violently in the second half goes beyond cinematic horror.” In a joint statement, the jury said of The Medium: “It dominates and plays a variation on all the formulae of exorcism and mockumentary. The Bucheon Choice: Features jury included directors Tony Kaye ( American History X) and Jo Sung-hee ( Space Sweepers), actress Moon Jeong Hee ( Cart), and film festival programmers Meenakshi Shedde and Jarod Neece. ![]() Korea-Thailand horror The Medium, produced by Na Hong-jin and directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun, has won the top prize at South Korea’s Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (Bifan, July 8-18).Īsia’s largest genre film festival awarded its Best of Bucheon prize to the shaman horror feature, which received its world premiere at Bifan.
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