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ACC Cinematheque is a program held in partnership with various film festivals based in and outside Korea to host free screenings of award-winning, experimental, arthouse and documentary films for the general public. The program, which has temporarily shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, finally returned this year, this time partnered with the Jeonju International Film Festival (JIFF).

The JIFF, dating back to 2000, was held for the 23rd time this year, between April 28 and May 7, offering the audiences 217 entries from 57 countries in total (123 from abroad, 94 from Korea; 143 feature-length films, 74 short films). This year’s festival featured both offline and online screenings as part of the ongoing measures to contain the pandemic. Yet nearly 47,171 spectators visited the Cinema Street in Jeonju as of the penultimate day of the festival.

A broad array of experiments were attempted in this year’s JIFF to accommodate both the audiences’ demands and the demands of pandemic restrictions. The special screenings for locals, the early-purchase ticket booths, the alleyway and outdoor screenings, and the Narae Korea Concert and Cinema Talk with Save the Children—both held thanks to active support and partnership from outside institutions—provided quality non-cinematic entertainment and enlightenment for over 3,000 spectators outside of theaters throughout the festival.

In addition to these diverse offline events, the JIFF also attracted attention with its metaverse-themed programs. Five of short film entries submitted to the previous year’s JIFF were screened at CGV World Map, an official venue on the global metaverse platform, Zepeto, for seven days. This innovative approach, which enabled audiences worldwide to participate in the festival digitally via the metaverse venue, seemed to hint at a new direction for the JIFF and other film festivals seeking to find a new direction for evolution in the post-pandemic period.

ACC Cinematheque, for its part, offered nine films, including the Grand Prize winner in the international category, for citizens of Gwangju to enjoy.

ACC Cinematheque Paving the Ground for Deeper Appreciation of Cinematic Art

The first to be screened at ACC Cinematheque was a series of three winners in the category of Korean short films, including the jury prize winner Wunderkammer 10.0 (32 minutes, Ki Yelim, Park Soyun, and Jung Inwoo), followed back-to-back by Blue Land (18 minutes, Keem Youngle) and Scriptures of the Wind (21 minutes, Moojin Brothers). After the screenings, an audience dialogue was held with Jeon Jin-su, the JIFF programmer; Keem Youngle, director of Blue Land; and Ki Yelim and Jung Inwoo, co-directors of Wunderkammer 10.0.

Wunderkammer 10.0 is centered on the eponymous system operating in a fictional future city to provide stable and rapid self-driving services for users. Blue Land features a group of the Smurfs, who land in Korea on October 12, 1904, to help build the Belgian embassy in the country. Landscape is the story of two brothers who try to uphold the order and values of their father and his generation.

Geographies of Solitude (103 minutes, Jacquelyn Mills), the grand prize winner in the international competition category, is a documentary chronicling the efforts of environmentalist, Zoe Lucas, who tries to protect the Sable Island National Park Reserve, a remote strip of land in Nova Scotia. Zoe, who initially entered the island in the 1970s as an aspiring artist intent on drawing the horses living there, transformed into a naturalist and environmentalist after spending decades on the island. She makes daily trips across the narrow island to observe horses, alive and dead, as well as nature, sorting and handling marine wastes washing ashore.

Let’s Say Revolution (127 minutes, Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Perceval) is a documentary chasing shamanistic practices across times and continents that hunt down human beings. It highlights dance as a tactic and a therapy that systematically dismantles the resistance of the sacrifice’s soul and body. The theme of 2 Pasolini (11 minutes, Andrei Ujica) is a fantasy encountered by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini while scouting for locations for his film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964).

A still from Semiotic Plastic.

Another offering at ACC Cinematheque was Semiotic Plastic (22 minutes, Radu Jude). The Romanian director/screenwriter, who won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for his Bad Luck Banging (2021), recreates the human lifespan with children’s toys in this short film. The director says he wanted to create a film that would “convey the essence of human life through not just words, but also the images of innocent toys.”

A still from The Moon and the Tree.

There were also two documentary offerings from Tsai Ming-Liang, the Malaysia-born face of the Taiwanese New Wave cinema. The Moon and the Tree tells the stories of Li Pei-Jing, undergoing physiotherapy after experiencing pain two years ago for the first time in her quadriplegic legs following a critical injury at the age of 23, and of Chang Feng, who resembles a tree that grows all the more mature and beautiful in the passage of time. The Night (20 minutes) chronicles a night in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, in 2019, which still remains captivatingly beautiful, but faces a series of sweeping changes.

Stoking Nostalgia with Classic Korean Animations in July

ACC Cinematheque will also screen four well-known works of Korean animation in June. Visit Theater 3 at ACC Archive and Research at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on July 28 and 29 to join the screenings. Hong Gil-Dong (66 minutes, 1967), Korea’s first-ever feature-length animated film, will play at 3 p.m. on July 28, then be followed by an audience dialogue with Mo Eun-yeong, the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival programmer, and Han Myeong-ah, an animation director.

A Story of Hong Gil-dong, an adaptation by director Shin Dong-heon of Hong Gil-Dong, a comic series by Shin Dong-woo, was a mega-hit in Korea when it was first released. It was so successful that it triggered a series of feature-length animation films to be produced in its wake in Korea. For the upcoming screening, the original animation underwent intensive digital restoration in 2021.

Hopi and Chadolbawi (74 minutes, 1967), to be played at 7 p.m. the same day, can be viewed as a sequel of sorts to Hong Gil-Dong. It portrays the adventure of Chadolbawi, a pupil of Hong Gil-dong, who sets out to find Hopi who saves Chadolbawi from a pack of wolves.

Meeting the audience at 3 p.m. the next day is A Little Dinosaur Dooly - The Adventure of Ice Planet (82 minutes, 1996), the feature-length extension of the popular TV series, which itself was an adaptation of the comics published in the popular comic magazine, Treasure Island, starting in 1983. The movie starts with the iceberg carrying Dooly banking on the Han River, and proceeds to show Dooly meeting the rest of the characters and embarking, accidentally, on a journey into the space due to a glitch in the space shuttle, Time Cosmos.

The final offering of this series will be Kongjwi and Patjwi (72 minutes, 1977), an animated adaptation of the famous children’s tale of the same name, combined with another well-known tale of two sisters, Janghwa and Hongnyeon. The film, produced by Yu Hyun-mok, a founding member of Cine-poem that was launched in 1964 to support experimental cinema and a leading figure of Korean filmmaking, was one of the first stop-motion animations attempted in Korea.

ACC Cinematheque’s screenings takes place at Theater 3 of ACC Archive and Research at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. on every last Thursday and Friday. The remaining screenings of the year will take place on July 28 and 29, August 25 and 26, September 22 and 23, October 27 and 28, November 22 and 26, and December 29 and 30. Note that the screenings for September will take place in the fourth week rather than the last, and those for November will take place on days other than the final Thursday and Friday of the month to accommodate another important film event (ACC Bad Film Festival).

An ACC Cinematheque poster.

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