BIFF founder's life celebrated in new biopic
Written by Sébastien Simon (@simsebou)
To watch a film about the behind-the-scenes work of a film festival at that very same festival is a rather meta experience. Directed by Busan-based documentarian Kim Yeongjo, Jiseok did not disappoint. Within its first minutes, text on screen evokes the tale of Theseus' ship while showing heartwrenching images of the now dry-docked wreck of the Sewol, a Korean ferry that sank in 2014 and saw 304 people, mostly teenagers, drown with it. Theseus' ship may have been around in Ancient Greece, but the on-screen text is taken from In the Sea of Cinema, a 2015 book written by the late Kim Jiseok, one of the founders of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), its original head programmer in charge of Asian films, and the person whose name gives this poignant documentary its title.
Jiseok largely draws on BIFF's troubled years following its screening of a Sewol-related documentary titled Diving Bell during its 2014 event. The film recounts the subsequent political backlash the festival suffered while maintaining focus on the figure of Kim Jiseok, who passed away from a sudden heart attack while attending the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Since BIFF managed to weather the political storms, the sinking-ship metaphor may seem overdramatic, yet it's perfectly on-point when you consider how close the iconic event came to capsising. However, that striking scene does highlight how the effects of real-life tragedies ripple in unsuspected ways and can claim more victims in its wake.
In effect, Kim Jiseok is BIFF's martyr. While borrowing posts and texts from his personal Facebook profile and archival footage from BIFF's past editions, Jiseok essentially follows two threads: interviews from Kim Jiseok's fellow BIFF co-founders, mixed with interviews from Asian filmmakers whose careers became intrinsically linked with the festival's own growth. As such, Kim Yeongjo's film stars cinema icons such as Hirokazu Kore-eda, Tsai Ming-liang, Tan Chui Mui, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and many more. While they all movingly recount how supportive and devoted Kim Jiseok was to them and how deep their ties grew over the years, the other interviews tell a strikingly different, almost opposite, and quite sadder story: one of illusions and strained friendships. As an amicable piece of self-promotion that complements the festival's self-published book BIFF x BIFF (a very interesting read co-written by David Cazzaro and Darcy Paquet in 2015, full of many people's personal anecdotes), Jiseok comes as close to diving into the festival's controversies as it decently can — or actually wants to.
The hot topics are rather candidly addressed and discussed several times by the people who were directly affected, but the true object of Kim Yeongjo's documentary lies elsewhere. This isn't really about petty infighting, mismanagement of funds or high-stakes political pressure: someone actually died here; let's show proper respect. As such, Jiseok proves to be an elegant and well-deserved tribute to the eponymous hero's life, passion and professional achievements. The film is made all the more sincere that all parties involved appear in it — that is, the original founders of the festival. The tale of how these friends started BIFF despite all odds is now the stuff of Korean cinema legend. Yet the very-real aftermath of the post-Diving Bell turmoil saw them inevitably disagree, bitterly argue, forcibly take sides, and ultimately disband. By all accounts, Kim Jiseok was trying to keep the peace but took on more than he could bear, both emotionally and in terms of workload. One of the main issues was whether to hold the festival in 2015 and 2016, or to cancel it in protest. While Kim Dong-ho, Jay Jeon, Park Gwan-su and Tony Rayns all deliver earnest and insightful interviews in their own rights, a surprising Oh Seok-geun stands out in his sorrowful, open-hearted regrets. Astutely, yet perhaps less sure of it now as he probably was then, he does point out that even the Cannes Film Festival has had to cancel editions in the past for political reasons — so why wouldn't BIFF?
Meanwhile, last-man-standing Lee Yongkwan, the current BIFF Chairperson and the only founder remaining at the festival today, whose much-expected interview essentially serves as Jiseok's climax, impresses in his defiant tone. He still calls Kim Jiseok stubborn for advocating to maintain the event at all costs, yet it is clear that he, too, misses his departed friend dearly.
Aside from all the film folks, we also hear Hong Eun-ok, Kim Jiseok's widow, share two vidid, possibly premonitory dreams she had about her late husband, which both subtly redirect the flow of interviews throughout the film. Mentioned near the start, her first dream happened to her just before Kim Jiseok made his fateful trip to Cannes, and leads the general topic of how stressed and stretched thin he was in his last two years that he eventually died from it. In the film's second half, Hong Eun-ok's other dream was of her husband keeping happily busy in heaven with his "Moon Theater."
“Since BIFF managed to weather the political storms, calling it a sinking ship may seem overdramatic, yet it’s perfectly on-point when you consider how close the iconic event came to capsising.”
Film festivals are curious things with a life of their own, high highs and lower lows, breakups and personal drama, and a frustrating tendency to fully satisfy no one. The more they expand, the more essential they become for their local film industry, the savvier their organizers must also become politically and, therefore, the easier it becomes to draw criticism. But also the easier it might be stray from their original intentions and from each other.
As one of Korea's most well-known success stories, the rise and popularity of the Busan International Film Festival nevertheless seem permanently overshadowed by the nostalgia it has generated for its first few years, during which the event was taking place between the city's iconic Jagalchi Fish Market and Gukje Market, in the popular Nampo-dong district. Everyone who has attended the event there will keep repeating stories from these humble beginnings, in an it-was-better-before sort of way.
Since 2011, the festival's main attractions are now mainly centered in the modern Centum City area. But Community-BIFF, a more recent and commendable addition to the festival's programme, has been reinvigorating the old Nampo stomping grounds, which had been all but deserted in the 2010s. Whether the BIFF founders have lost their way or actually stayed true to their ideals despite it all, whether the event itself is exactly what it was meant to become or has changed beyond any measure of recognition like Theseus' ship, to say that the Busan International Film Festival literally grew beyond its founders' wildest dreams would be putting it mildly. The Guinness-record-holding behemoth that is the Busan Cinema Center can be seen as an oversized, evil-twin version of Kim Jiseok's lifelong dream of what he called his "Moon Theater," a simple one-screen venue he spent his whole life enthusiastically telling everyone he would one day open near the ocean to screen films under the starlight. Interestingly, the first mention of that fabled place only happens midway through Jiseok but becomes a topical thread between most interviews in the second half of the film, culminating in a beautiful hommage in its closing moments. Composed of several short clips made by some of Kim Jiseok's filmmaker friends, who each shot their own moon-based video elegy to his now-impossible dream, this melancholic finale caps off the film in purely cinematographic and poetic fashion. An apt conclusion for a documentary about someone who quite literally gave his life to cinema.
For more information on Jiseok, click here.
