[HanCinema's Korea Diaries] "Muju" June 1st-5th

I came to Muju to cover the Muju International Film Festival (MIFF), and there's a lot about this festival worth knowing. First off, MIFF is extremely spectator oriented. All the movies are free, even though anything that took place in a theater on the weekend was likely to be sold out. Free shuttle buses come in from Seoul, Daejeon, and Jeonju. And like all film festivals, there are scenes like this where people from behind a table address a crowd about some topic or other. In this case, festival matters are publically discussed by Oh Ji-ho and Son Eun-seo - the celebrity faces of the festival this year.

A major sponsor of MIFF is the unfortunately acronymed WTF- that stands for World Taekwondo Federation, which uses adorable tiger mascots to inform people about how great Taekwondo is. All right I'll be honest- I only took this photo because, being a child, I thought the acronym was funny.

Muju is one of those counties that's located in the absolute middle of nowhere, so it's little surprise that they have more of these strange totems whose purpose I have yet to identify. Oh, and on the whole middle of nowhere thing- don't try to stay in Muju overnight without some sort of plan. Muju was the first time this trip I had genuine difficulty finding lodging. Everything was fully booked. Well, the cheap places anyway. That I could find.

Even though MIFF is officially billed as an outdoors film festival it's not actually possible to screen movies outdoors until nighttime, what with the sun being in the way and all. So most of the time if you actually go out to the big stage what you're going to get is performances like these, that involve good folks affiliated with the WTF (teehee) performing elaborate flag shows.

Now that's a lot of flags. And the synchronization- fabulous! The reason why flags are such an explicit highlight is because most spectators are relatively far away, so flags are something that can be very easily scene. The Taekwondo outfits themselves, well, those are a standard that no one is really allowed to mess with. Although there are exceptions-

She does Taekwondo too, of course, although being the only apparent woman involved in the performance, there is the benefit of being able to wear pretty dancing dresses in the purpose of acting out various silly skits. Mind, any such performance is going to look much more impressive in motion than I can possibly exposit through pictures.

There is, of course, the occassional lucky break like this shot, which I was not expecting to come out so well. People kicking apart little slabs of wood from all sorts of elaborate angles are pretty common any time there's a public Taekwondo demonstration in South Korea. They appear to be the main standard regardless of whether the performance takes the form of fairy tale play for children or a demonstration involving monks. Yes, those happen too, depending on the temple you go to.

And now, a word of warning on traveling in rural South Korea. While Muju is very friendly to spectators in regards to its official event bus structure, the public bus system utilized every other day of the year is virtually nonexistent. They might show up once every hour if you're lucky. If you're unlucky you could get lost in the middle of the nowhere, in the middle of the night, feebly walking huge distances in the hopes of finding some sort of signpost that will mark a departure point to the main city.

What I'm getting at is, while Muju may be fun for movies (and probably the firefly festival later this year), more than any other location I've been to, you really need to go there with a plan. Which is probably good travel advice overall, it's just I'm a very unsensible person who doesn't follow it.

Article by William Schwartz

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