PUSAN, A BUSTLING container port on the southern coast of South Korea, doesn't look like an obvious setting for a film festival. Sure, there's a beach and a sprinkling of luxury hotels, but the horizon is dotted with cranes, not palm trees, and the town, with its acres of concrete, has a distinctly industrial feel.
None of which seems to bother the thousands of movie fans who flock to the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) each year. Since its inception in 1996, it has become one of the most popular festivals in Asia, with an annual audience of some 170,000 people. It's also become the premier event for the Asian film industry to press the flesh, find investors for new projects and check out the most promising new films.
This year's line-up featured 39 world premieres, ensuring that foreign film critics and programmers from other international festivals were also out in force.
According to PIFF veterans, much of the success is due to the enthusiasm of South Korea's movie fans, who travel to Pusan from all over the country and think nothing of queuing for hours to buy tickets. These patient cineastes don't even have any assurances that they'll get tickets for the films they want to see. The 5,000 seats for the outdoor screening of this year's opener, Wong Kar-wai's 2046, sold out in a record-breaking four minutes. And tickets to many other screenings went just as quickly.
'The Korean audience is really enthusiastic,' says Wong, who attended the festival with 2046 star Tony Leung Chiu-wai. 'The first time I came here, I met fans who'd travelled from all over the country. It's wonderful to see.'
Fellow Hong Kong director Fruit Chan, who served on the jury of this year's New Currents competition (for first- and second-time directors), is also impressed by Korean film buffs. 'Young people are crazy about cinema here,' says Chan, whose most recent work, Three ... Extremes (a co-production between Hong Kong, Korea and Japan), also screened at the festival. 'Asia now has too many film festivals,' Chan says. 'But Pusan is unique. It provides a good opportunity to see the best of both Korean independent and mainstream film.'
But during the nine-day event, which ended on Friday, there were signs that PIFF may be growing too fast and falling victim to its own success. Many visitors complained about the difficulty of securing tickets. It didn't help that screenings were split between two locations that are an hour apart by subway or bus.