BORN TO BE BLUE and Remastered DIE BAD to Bookend Jeonju Film Festival

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BORN TO BE BLUE and Remastered DIE BAD to Bookend Jeonju Film Festival

Apr 01, 2016

Writer by Pierce Conran
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JIFF Presents Program for 17th Edition

The 17th edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival will open with Robert Burdreau’s Chet Baker biopic Born to Be Blue with Ethan Hawke on April 28th. A digitally remastered version of RYOO Seung-wan’s debut film Die Bad, which featured in the first edition of JIFF in 2000, will be presented as the closing film of the festival, which will run until May 7th. Likening him to JIFF, LEE Chung-jik, the festival’s new director, called RYOO a representative director of Korean cinema who has retained his independent spirit.

Under the new slogan ‘Jeonju, the Cinepolis of Spring’, the festival will feature a record number of films and screenings this year. The program will present 211 works, including 49 world premieres. The festival is also introducing a new Documentary Award, to be given to a non-fiction work among the films in the Korean Competition and Korean Cinemascape lineups.

Among the sidebars will be the special focuses ‘Philippe Grandrieux: The Rediscovery of the Cinematic Language’, ‘Shakespeare in Cinema’ and ‘Modern Chilean Cinema: A New Territory in Latin America’.

This year’s International Competition jury will feature Korean actor JUNG Jae-young (Castaway on the Moon, 2009) and director OH Seung-uk (The Shameless, 2015), as well as French Cinematheque director Jean-Francois Rauger, Canadian director Denis Cote and Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari. Many local luminaries will also feature on other juries, including The Servant (2010) director KIM Dae-woo, HAN Gong-ju (2014) director LEE Su-jin and Haemoo (2014) actress HAN Ye-ri.

As previously reported, the Jeonju Cinema Projects (known before as the Jeonju Digital Projects) this year will be KIM Soo-hyun’s black comedy Great Patrioteers, CHO Jae-min’s high school drama A Stray Goat, the first feature work from the MYUNG FILMS INSTITUTE, and Lukas Valenta Rinner’s Argentinian swingers’ club drama The Decent.

Korean premieres will include the National Human Rights Commission-produced omnibus If You Were Me 7, featuring entries by CHOI Equan (The Voice, 2005), SHIN Yeon-shick (The Avian Kind, 2015) and LEE Kwang-kuk (A Matter of Interpretation, 2015), the Old Boy (2003) documentary Old Days from HAN Sun-hee, and Bittersweet Brew, the fifth consecutive invitation for director LEE Sang-woo.

Among the other notable films screening at JIFF this spring will be Alex Van Warderdam's Schneider vs. Bax, Paul Thomas Anderson’s mid-length documentary Junun, Thomas Vinterberg’s The Commune, Corneliu Porumboiu’s The Treasure, Anders Thomas Jensen’s Men & Chicken, Gaspar Noe’s Love and the Johnny TO-produced anthology Trivisa.

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