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[HanCinema's Korea Diaries] "Bucheon" July 22nd-23rd

In South Korea, at least, mid-large size film festivals are usually accompanied by a lot of concerts. Initially I was puzzled by this emphasis, but as I've been to more and more of these film festivals I've come to appreciate the sheer exhilaration of the crowd whenever a band passionately takes to the stage for the sole purpose of rocking out. This particular band, by the way, is Romantic Punch, who so far as I can tell are pretty obsessive about their road trips.

In other news of lesser known landmarks, The Ahn Jung-geun Park (안중근공원) lies a little to the east of the UPLEX CGV. A person trying to traverse the Bucheon International Fantastical Film Festival on foot will run past its many monuments several times. The gist of all the various murals is mostly the same story- about how with Japan's official annexation of Korea imminent, many patriots trained in preparation to do whatever was necessary to guarantee Korea's indepence.

In the end they weren't terribly successful in this goal, although Ahn Jung-geun himself did manage to assassinate Ito Hirobumi who was seen as one of the more important proponents of Korean annexation. Aesthetically and information wise, the Ahn Jung-geun Park, though a tad small is still one of the better Liberation parks I've seen, although pretty much none of the material is in English.

Mainly, though, the reason why I'm so happy the Ahn Jung-geun Park exists is that it's a welcome respite from the vicious traffic that consumes the Bucheon area on a daily basis. See those little booths on the side? Traffic is so bad vendors set up shop in that area to sell stuff to passing motorists. It's probably an illegal business but given the semi-permanent nature of the stands no one appears interested in trying to stop it. I do find myself wondering what exactly the intended purposes of all that yellow traffic paint is supposed to be, though.

This is a South Korean self-laundromat, which I memorialized in photographic format mostly because they are insanely difficult to find. This one in particular was also fairly expensive- four dollars to wash and four more to dry, although as advertised, these machines are twice as fast as the ones at home. Figuring out how to do laundry is the main hurdle I've had to living on the road. Outside of a guest house self laundromats are just too hard to find. Dry cleaning is available everywhere, but believe me, while the price is good for normal clothes, stuff like underwear is just too prohibitively expensive.

Back to the film festival. One of the more eccentric offerings on display at Bucheon this year was a Fulldome. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like- a dome where you watch movies. Like this-

Imagine that a movie screen is on the ceiling, organized in concave fashion, and what you have is Fulldome. The problem with this, unsurprisingly, is that watching movies in this way tends to hurt your head. Especially if you're trying to see what's on the part of the dome that's behind you. The only way I could figure out how to watch the Fulldome movies without hurting myself was to lie down on the ground. They're not bad (this one was about skydiving), but they appear to have been designed with owls as the primary audience.

Still, free is free, and anyone could drop in anytime. The looping program went on for a couple of hours. Even on the weekdays there was a fairly decent throng of spectators- many of whom were admittedly waiting for their turn to watch the virtual reality film Catatonic. Alas, virtual reality is not very easy to photograph, so all I can tell you is this- yeah, it was decently spooky.

Article by William Schwartz

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