Though its global reputation doesn’t compete with the nearby showcase in Busan, which is perhaps the most high-profile event of its kind in Asia, the Jeonjun International Film Festival continues to be every bit as exciting as its more celebrated South Korean counterpart. At this year’s edition, sold out theaters for even the more obscure or low-key films attested to the buzz that the JIFF generates in the region. Crowds here also seemed to skew a good couple of decades younger than those that you see at the average festival, which bodes well for the future of filmmaking and cinephilia in all its forms, in Korea and further afield.
As usual, the focus of this year’s JIFF was on emerging talent, but there were a few notable releases directed by established filmmakers dotted throughout the schedule. Debuting at Sundance back in January, The Pod Generation is Sophie Barthes’s first feature in nine years, and it displays a similarly high-concept premise to her feature-length debut, 2009’s Cold Souls. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Emilia Clarke as a couple of young professionals who choose to participate in an innovative new tech scheme that allows them to have kids without disrupting their careers. Following artificial insemination, their fetus is grown in a large white metallic pod, which requires nothing more than the occasional software update to see their offspring through to the end of its technologically accelerated gestation period.
Despite its futuristic setting, The Pod Generation feels strangely dated, both thematically and aesthetically. Landing somewhere between Spike Jonze’s Her and an uninspired episode of Black Mirror, it fails to establish real emotional stakes for its characters, and only gestures at the philosophical challenges offered by this kind of low-key, contemplative sci-fi. Barthes’s imagery does set up a dichotomy between nature and machine that’s occasionally engaging, and the film offers a timely critique of corporate interference in the most fundamental elements of human nature, but it’s apparently unwilling to explore any of its ideas in depth.
A more low-profile film with a more contemporary feel, writer-director Lautaro García Candela’s Cambio Cambio also hinted at how the near-future might pan out for a different demographic of society. Set primarily in the streets of Buenos Aires, it opens with an extended sequence of newsreel footage about Argentina’s spiraling inflation since 2019, before introducing the loose community of informal currency brokers who ply their semi-legal trade around the capital’s main tourist spots. At the center of the story is a pair of young lovers seeking to move away to build a better life for themselves in Europe, running an elaborate scheme around the exchange business to make enough money to cover their costs.
Cambio Cambio is populated with believable supporting characters, and its street scenes often exude a cinema-vérité rawness that goes a long way toward compensating for the rote script. Though it doesn’t seek to emulate the patient naturalism of the likes of the Dardenne brothers—whose most recent work of social realism, Tori and Lokita, opened this year’s JIFF—Candela’s film offers a similarly unsentimental portrait of modern-day precarious youth navigating shifting tides of capital, one that progresses to an inevitable but nevertheless affecting climax.
The festival concluded with a screening of Kim Hee-jung’s latest feature, Where Would You Like to Go?, a melancholy portrait of grief based on a short story of the same name by Kim Ae-ran. After her husband dies in a tragic accident on a school trip, a bookshop owner, Myeong-ji (Park Ha-seon), leaves Korea to stay at a relative’s home in Warsaw, where she has a chance encounter with one of her husband’s old friends, Hyeon-seok (Kim Name-hee). Wandering around landmarks of the city’s troubled history, Myeong-ji also starts to develop a form of psoriasis on her skin, a similarly physical manifestation of past trauma.
The film’s sensitive exploration of loss and memory might not dig up enough nuggets of wisdom to justify its glacial pace, but its fish-out-of-water scenario and low-key idiosyncrasies do convey the inherent strangeness of bereavement effectively. It was a fitting end to this year’s edition of JIFF, an event that survived the trauma of lockdown to demonstrate impressive potential.
The Jeonju International Film Festival ran from April 27—May 6.
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