Film Festivals Local and Abroad

While Korean films are still somewhat a staple in our film calendar, it's usually the horror films that make it to the screens here because of our local audience's voracious appetite for it. So anything outside that genre is touch and go, which provides an opportunity for a festival to be organized to showcase the best that Korea cinema has to offer. The highlight for me this year will definitely be the remake of The Housemaid by Lim Sang-soo, which had done its Cannes round earlier in May. Other films that pique by fancy include sports film Take-Off and fantasy film Jeon Woo Chi: The Taoist Wizard, with action drama Righteous Ties and comedy Antique rounding off the selection.

Unlike the Spanish Film Festival some weeks back which had most of the screenings in DVD format, the films selected in this festival are in 35mm format, so even if you have the DVD of the selection, nothing beats watching them on the big screen in the intended format. Tickets cost S$10 per show, and GV Movie Club members get a S$1 discount.

The Korean Film Festival 2010 will run from 21 to 24 October at GV VivoCity.


For those who associate the Tribeca Film Festival with New York, you may not know that there's a Doha Tribeca Film Festival, which is the cultural companion film festival to the one in New York. Into its second edition, this year's DTFF will run from 26-30 October in Doha, Qatar, and features quite the lineup of feature and short films from around the world. French-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb's Outside The Law will open the festival, and it closes with Justin Chadwick’s The First Grader.

Films will be categorized into the Arab Film Competition, World Panorama, Special Screenings and the Arab Short Film Competition, and notable films and filmmakers include Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, Matt Reeves' Let Me In, Stephen Frears' Tamara Drewe, Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for "Superman", and a co-production film between China and US titled Little Sister, an Asian version of the Cinderella story shot in China's Yunnan Province.

Don't worry if you can't head towards Dohar for this, as you can get to follow proceedings from the multimedia official festival website soon!

Finally, December's not going to be unhappening any more. This year's Animation Nation takes place from 1-8 Dec, and while the lineup isn't announced yet, seeing the Facebook page go live is something to get excited over, since traditionally the festival takes place in October, which has been really crowded this year, leaving one wondering if it's still on. Go ahead and like that Facebook page, you know you want to.

So that page is now the first positive sign that the festival, one of my favourites on the local film festival calendar, is not shelved away, but will happen pretty soon. December can't come soon enough!

See you at the movies!