The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
BUCHEON City, South Korea—I am here in the middle of a game-changing film festival on genre projects.
This is a gathering of who’s who in the international genre filmmaking (fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, horror, supernatural etc.) industry.
This is my fourth time at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN), the largest, most prestigious, immersive and the first ever genre fest in Asia.
I have and still am hobnobbing with world film professionals like directors like Johnnie To of Hong Kong, Roger Garcia, Hollywood biggies as Chris Lee and Barry Sabath, K-pop iconic actress Son Ye-jin, Variety Asia Editor Patrick Frater, Korean film artists Sungho Kim, Steve M. Choe, to name only a few.
I have been attending conferences like AI fora and press interviews, watching movies of fantastic styles and persuasion etc.
During my first appearance at the fest of genre films (fantasy, sci-fi, thriller, horror, supernatural etc.), it was still Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan) in 2011.
Puchon is the older name of Bucheon.
I was there as a film student at the PiFan Fantastic Film School (FFS) where we were taught the rudiments of conceptualizing, writing, producing, marketing, distributing etc. genre movies.
My second visit in 2022 and the next, in 2023, the name of the event was already changed to BIFAN.
You see, I write annually the Philippine Cinema Report for the “Made in Asia” book, a project of the Bucheon Industry Gathering (B.I.G.) and the BIFAN’s Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF) which presents the current market trends in more than ten Asian filmmaking capitals like China, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, India, Vietnam, Singapore, Mongolia, Central Asia and the Philippines.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I boldly went to BIFAN to witness a burgeoning film industry amid a global health emergency.
It’s all worth it and I would like to thank the pivotal people of BIFAN like Jongsuk Thomas Nam, Samantha Moon, Shin Chul, Jonathan Kim etc. for their accommodation. BOY
VILLASANTA