‘Pedro’ Filmmakers Natesh Hegde, Rishab Shetty Reteam for Busan APM Project ‘Tiger’s Pond’

Netflix announced an upcoming thriller Korean series, The Bequeathed, to be written by Train To Busan and Hellbound director Yeon Sang-ho.South Korean news outlet Yonhap News Agency reported yesterday (October 18) that Netflix had decided to produce the brand-new series written and directed by Yeon Sang-ho. The streaming platform also announced the casting of actors Kim Hyun-joo (Trolley, Love All Play) and Park Hee-soon (A Model Family, My Name) in lead roles for The Bequeathed.

BTS have unveiled the official performance of ‘Proof’ B-side ‘Run BTS’ from their recent Busan concert.On October 15, the boyband held their ‘Yet To Come’ concert in Busan as part of the city’s World Expo 2030 bid, marking their first show in six months. At the concert, BTS also debuted the performance of ‘Run BTS’ from their June 2022 compilation album ‘Proof’.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief The free concert by K-pop sensation BTS in Busan, Korea, was viewed by upwards of 49 million people on Saturday. The free-of-charge “BTS ‘Yet to Come’ in Busan” concert was held in support of Busan’s bid to host the 2030 World Expo and represented an attempt to introduce the city and Korean culture to global audience. After a change of venue, the physical component was held at the city’s Asiad Main Stadium and attracted some 50,000 in-person guests. An additional 10,000 people in the city watched a live retransmission at the Busan Port, and a further 2,000 gathered in Haeundae, the tourist area that recently played host to the Busan International Film Festival.

Korean filmmaker Lee Jeong-hong’s A Wild Roomer and Shivamma, from India’s Jaishankar Aryar, were the winners of the New Currents Awards at the close of an encouragingly busy Busan International Film Festival (BIFF, October 5-14).

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Korean film “A Wild Roomer” and India’s “Shivamma” have been announced as the joint winners of the New Currents competition, the prestige discovery section of the Busan International Film Festival. “We were particularly sensitive to the lightness and subtlety of the director’s view of his characters. Through his innovative cinematography, he creates original circulations between the characters within a house, and builds a very contemporary universe,” the competition jury said of the Lee Jeon-hong-directed “A Wild Roomer.” “We appreciated the originality and intensity with which the director was able to tell this very contemporary story. Here documentary and fiction meet in an organic and spirited way of making cinema. The generosity of the actors and the scenes create a closeness with this universal story that takes place in an Indian village,” the jury said of the Jaishankar Aryar-directed “Shivamma.”

Big Hit Music has issued a new statement addressing the “unauthorised use” of BTS‘ trademark ahead of the band’s forthcoming ‘Yet To Come’ concert in Busan, where the label says it will crack down on “counterfeit” merchandise.The statement, written in both Korean and English, was shared on Big Hit Music’s official social media channels yesterday (October 11). The label revealed that it has been taking “strict measures against companies that have been repeatedly producing, selling and distributing products that infringe on BTS’ portrait and trademark rights (‘rights violating products’)”.The label also announced plans to “conduct on-site inspection[s] and investigation[s] of counterfeit products” at and around the venue of BTS’ forthcoming ‘Yet To Come’ concert in Busan, slated to take place this weekend on October 15 at the Busan Asiad Main Stadium.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief “Future Laobans,” a project directed by Maung Sun and produced by Maung Sun and Ma Aeint, claimed the Busan Prize, the top award at the Asian Project Market, on Tuesday. The awards were made at an event held at the Paradise Hotel in Busan’s Haeundae district at the end of three days of quick-fire meetings between producers and directors and an array of potential co-producers, financiers and distributors. Organizers said that they put together 705 such one-on-one meetings. The CJ ENM Award went to Indonesia’ “Gaspar,” to be directed by Yosep Anggi Noen and produced by Yulia Evina Bhara and Cristian Imanueli.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Rithy Panh, director of “Rice People” and “S21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” is an icon of art-house cinema, at once political, unique, and charming. The iconic image may be another of his confections – a palatable work built on uncomfortable facts. On the incomplete evidence of a 50-minute on-stage dialog at the Busan International Film Festival on Sunday, Panh comes across as simultaneously contrarian and principled. A curmudgeonly veteran and yet a filmmaker still curious to learn. “If there were no Khmer Rouge maybe I would not be a filmmaker,” he said of the Communist insurgents, who won the Cambodian civil war in 1975 and whose brutality and atrocities he has spent a lifetime documenting and exposing.

Rebecca Souw TITLE: Behind The Scenes For Singapore-Korea Co-Production “Ajoomma” And Its Journey Ahead Post-Busan The past few weeks have gone by in a blur for Singapore-Korean co-produced comedy film “Ajoomma.” In a short span, it had a world premiere at the 27th Busan International Film Festival, earned four Golden Horse nominations including best actress, best new director, best original screenplay and best supporting actor. And Singapore has selected the film as itOscars contender. But it took seven years to get his far. At a Busan workshop on Saturday, first-time director He Shuming, co-founder of Giraffe Pictures and the film’s executive producer Anthony Chen and co-producer Lee Joon-han discussed the how the film came to life. “Ajoomma: The Curious Case Study of a Singaporean-Korean Co-production” was presented by mylab at the Asian Contents & Film Market.

Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo and Squid Game were the big winners at Busan International Film Festival’s Asia Contents Awards (ACAs), which featured a star-studded red carpet and welcomed back international guests for the first time since the event’s inaugural edition in 2019. Extraordinary Attorney Woo took the Best Content Award, the top prize of the ceremony, as well as Best Actress for Park Eun Bin, who heads the show in the role of a young female lawyer with autism. The series was broadcast in Korea on the ENA cable channel where it set the record for the highest ratings in the channel’s history. Netflix also started streaming the show in select territories from June, after which it topped the streamer’s non-English language weekly rankings for two months straight. Netflix’s Squid Game won the Technical Achievement Award and Best Supporting Actor for Park Haesoo, who plays the childhood friend of Lee Jung-jae’s main character in the Emmy award-winning series. Best Actor was presented to Suzuki Ryohei, star of Japanese series Mobile Emergency Room, which was broadcast on Japanese channel TBS and Disney+, while Best Supporting Actress went to Sora Ma of Singaporean series This Land Is Mine. Best Newcomer went to actress Bao Shang En for Chinese show Love Behind The Melody and actor Yokohama Ryusei for Japan’s The Journalist. China’s Wang Xiaoshuai (So Long, My Son) and Yang Yishu were awarded Best Writer for Wang’s first foray into drama series, The Pavilion, produced by Chinese streamer iQiyi. Chinese actress Fan Bingbing was awarded the ACA Excellence Award.

Rebecca Souw Still riding high on the success of “The Roundup,” Korean indie film producer and seller K-Movie Entertainment, is showcasing a slate of 16 movies at the Asian and Contents Film Market, part of the Busan International Film Festival.

Naman Ramachandran The Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology (Kemendikbudristek) has expressed its support for the strong contingent of filmmakers from the country at the Busan International Film Festival. There are 20 participants from Indonesia across the festival’s various strands. Indonesian content in the festival program includes: Makbul Mubarak’s Venice winner and Toronto selection “Autobiography” and Kamila Andini’s “Before, Now & Then” (“Nana”) in A Window on Asian Cinema section; Joko Anwar’s “Satan’s Slave 2: Communion” at Midnight Passion; series “Blood Curse” in the On Screen program; and two Indonesian co-productions – the omnibus “Look at Me, Touch Me, Kiss Me” and “Stone Turtle” are also included at A Window on Asian Cinema. In the Asian Project Market, “Gaspar,” directed by Yosep Anggi Noen and produced by Yulia Evina Bhara and Christian Immanuel, features, and 10 young Indonesian filmmakers are participating at Platform Busan.

Naman Ramachandran Malaysian filmmaker Woo Ming Jin, whose work has been showcased at the Busan International Film Festival from his first feature “Monday Morning Glory” (2005), is back with his latest feature “Stone Turtle.” The film, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at Locarno earlier this year, follows a woman living in the peninsular Malaysian east coast, who gets entangled with a stranger who claims to be a turtle researcher, in a dangerous dance of duplicity and deception. “Stone Turtle” originated from the time Woo spent at the east coast of Malaysia a few years ago, where he met some turtle egg poachers and villages that subsisted on this trade. He learned a lot about the region’s history, culture and way of life and this became his impetus for creating the protagonist of the film.

Naman Ramachandran Filmmakers in the Philippines will no longer have to pay back production grants received from Film Philippines, the organization also known as Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP), it was revealed at Busan’s Asian Contents & Film Market on Saturday. “The Film Philippines incentives and grants are the same, and the benefits that you can get and the percentages of cash rebate that you can get, they’re still the same. The only difference is it’s now non-recoupable funds, meaning that the beneficiary does not need to return any of the funds that they receive,” David Fabros, unit manager, special projects and external affairs at the FDCP told Variety. “It used to be otherwise. It used to be that FDCP required an equity share to be returned. But now that has been revised and removed. So now all the grants of Film Philippines incentives are non-recoupable.”

Naman Ramachandran Vietnamese Writer-director Le Bao and Singapore and Toronto-based producer Lai Weijie, who collaborated successfully on “Taste” (2021), are reuniting for Busan Asian Project Market title “The Sea is Calm Tonight.” “Taste,” Le’s feature debut, had considerable festival play and won awards at Berlin, Singapore, Taipei and the Asia Pacific Screen Awards. In “The Sea is Calm Tonight,” Vietnamese boat people of 40 years past have a miraculous meeting with Rohingya refugees of the present in their parallel sea journeys to find peace. “When my mother was pregnant with me, my parents lived on a barge amidst a large river. Whenever a strong gust of wind blew or boats crossed the river, the water surface would accumulate into waves, like sea waves. When I was younger, my parents told me that they wished my name was Lê Biển, which means the sea. The thought of this other life with a different identity lingers in my mind,” Le told Variety.

Naman Ramachandran Priyanka Chopra Jonas (“The White Tiger”), Richie Mehta (“Delhi Crime”) and Anurag Kashyap (“Sacred Games”) are among the luminaries who are part of Awedacious Originals’ slate. Awedacious is a production company led by Apoorva Bakshi, one of the producers of Mehta’s International Emmy-winning Netflix series “Delhi Crime,” and Monisha Thyagarajan, who served as associate producer on the show.

Rebecca Souw “Bogota: City of the Lost,” one of the most expensive Korean films ever made, heads the sales slate presented at Busan by Megabox Plus M, part of Korea’s J Contentree listed company. Crime noir, “Bogota” took 21 months to produce and saw its principal photography start in January 2020 but soon become a victim of COVID. Song Joong Ki (“Space Sweepers”) stars as a young man moving to Colombia with his family for a better life, but he ends up living from hand to mouth. He later goes against all odds to dominate Bogota’s black market. The picture also stars Lee Hee-jun (“The Drug King”) and was directed by Kim Seong-je (“The Unfair”).

Rebecca Souw CJ ENM, which includes Korea’s largest film producer and distributor, is using the Asian Contents & Film Market this week to launch a handful of new titles while basking in its recent box office and festival successes. “The Boys” gets its premiere as a special screening withing the Busan International Film Festival’s expanded Korean Cinema Today section. This crime drama delves into the lives of three teenage boys, falsely accused and jailed for a brutal robbery-murder case. Fifteen years later, they seek a retrial in a bid to prove their innocence.

Naman Ramachandran Cinematographer Pushan Kripalani returns to the director’s chair with Goldfish, seven years after his acclaimed directorial debut “The Threshold.” In the film, Anamika, a half-Indian half-English woman, returns home to the U.K. to deal with her mother’s dementia and the scars of her childhood. The cast includes Kalki Koechlin (“Sacred Games”), veteran Deepti Naval (“The Good Karma Hospital”), Gordon Warnecke (“Venus”), Rajit Kapur (“Rocket Boys”) and Bharti Patel (“The Undeclared War”). “It’s very difficult to make independent cinema, as it does not get funded easily and so it’s taken me this long to get to make this film. I feel that dealing with larger questions is only possible by examining the smaller parts of human relationships. I feel that my job is to further the human conversation and this was a wonderful way to attempt to do that,” Kripalani told Variety.

Patrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Kamila Andini, Indonesian filmmaker and member of the jury at this year’s Busan International Film Festival, said that she would look out for “Asian texture” among the films presented in the festival’s premiere New Currents competition section. French director Alain Guiraudie said that he would be seeking “new colors” and “new flavors.” He added that he thought Asian cinema could be “enigmatic and mysterious.” Both were speaking at a meet the press event on Thursday, the first full day of the festival. And jurors have yet to start screening the competition titles.