"[2024 JIFF] Turning Point: Jeonju International Film Festival, Must-See Documentary Highlights"

The 25th Jeonju International Film Festival has reached its turning point. Many audiences visited Jeonju during the holiday period from Labour Day on May 1st to Children's Day substitute holiday on the 6th. Major works sold out, allowing us to feel the completely normalised festival atmosphere after COVID-19. On the 7th, when this manuscript is published, the awards for the competition section are scheduled to take place, and the festival will be heading towards its conclusion. However, it is not too late now. We have four days until the closing. Today, we introduce must-see documentary highlights from the festival.

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<Michel Gondry: Do It Yourself>

Director: François Nemeta | 2023 | 12+ | Asian Premiere

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Now better known as the director of <Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind> (2004) and <Science of Sleep> (2006), director Michel Gondry began his video work by creating music videos for the rock band Oui Oui, where he was a drummer. He later collaborated with Björk, Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, Kylie Minogue, Paul McCartney, and others, showcasing a creative and original world through music videos. The film captures his early animation style, examples of how he creatively overcame the limitations of technological development, and the filmmaking process, converging into the hard-hitting teachings of a master. It is a practical lesson that if you want something, you must 'do it yourself.' François Nemeta, who has built a friendship with Gondry over more than 30 years, including serving as his assistant director for ten years, shared during a conversation with the audience at the festival that Gondry had not seen this film and was quite annoyed to become the subject of a documentary, eliciting laughter from the audience.

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<Laika Cinema>

Director: Berrico Bidak | 2023 | All Ages | International Premiere

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There is another documentary featuring a master director. Aki Kaurismäki lives in a small Finnish town that has relied solely on the metal industry for the past 200 years. He is a director who has depicted the lives of the socially marginalised, including vagrants, blue-collar workers, and immigrants, and is a globally renowned master who has won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Poet and writer Mika Ratti, along with his friend Aki Kaurismäki, builds a cinema using recycled materials on the site of an empty town steelworks. Here, Kaurismäki appears not as the owner of the theatre but as a member of the workforce. The film observes the life of the town and reflects the process of the residents creating the cinema, posing the question, 'What is a cinema?'

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<Room 666>

Director: Wim Wenders | 1982 | All Ages

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This time, a group of master directors appears. In 1982, during the Cannes Film Festival, director Wim Wenders installed a fixed camera in room 666 of the Martinez Hotel and invited filmmakers to answer the following question: “Is cinema a language that will soon disappear, an art that will soon be extinct?” Those entering the room had about 11 minutes to respond. The answers to this question were recorded in <Room 666>, and the film became a myth due to the participants' fame and legendary responses. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Spielberg, Monte Hellman, Werner Herzog, and Susan Seidelman left their thoughts on the future of cinema, predictions, doubts, proverbs, and signs in their own ways in response to Wenders' question.

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<The Cats of Gokogu Shrine>

Director: Sōda Kazuhiro | 2024 | All Ages | Korean Premiere

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The Gokogu Shrine, located on Ushimado in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan, is known as the 'Cat Shrine' due to the dozens of stray cats that gather there. While cats and residents seem to coexist peacefully, they each have their own grievances. There are opinions that the cats settled at the shrine can positively impact tourism, while others argue that the cats can be harmful to hygiene and that their presence creates more waste. However, they do not quarrel. When issues regarding cats arise as major agenda items in town meetings, the serious discussions and efforts to find common ground evoke laughter, yet also touch the heart as they strive for coexistence with other species. At the end of the film, the scene of residents carefully burying a dead cat overlaps with that of someone abandoning a kitten at the shrine, leaving a complex feeling about 'the coexistence of humans and nature.'

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<Hollywood Gate>

Director: Ibrahim Nashat | 2023 | 12+ | Korean Premiere

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As the United States ended its 'forever war' in Afghanistan and withdrew, the Taliban seized a container building believed to be a CIA base. The base is named 'Hollywood Gate,' and it is still filled with usable war supplies. Taliban Air Force Commander Malawai Mansur, who inspects the base, instructs his subordinates to make a list of usable equipment and to repair it for the upcoming battle with neighbouring Tajikistan. Thus, military equipment worth over $7 billion (9 trillion won) left by the US military falls into the hands of the Taliban for free. This incredible documentary, which captured senior Taliban military officials for a year, was made possible because the Taliban allowed filming for propaganda purposes.

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<Incident>

Director: Bill Morrison | 2023 | 15+ | Asian Premiere

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This is the new work of Bill Morrison, a master of found footage cinema, reconstructing the 2018 Chicago police shooting incident. The director reassembles the incident and its aftermath in a continuous and synchronised split-screen montage from various perspectives, including CCTV, police body cams, and vehicle dashboard cameras. Using only surveillance camera footage, the film delivers shocking and painful insights into modern North American society within a short runtime of 30 minutes, positioning itself between a thriller and an exposé. The long-standing tragic elements that have shaped today's America, such as the social and economic conditions that have led to rampant crime in specific areas, legislation legalising gun ownership, systematic racial profiling by police, and the presumption of innocence granted to police, are all powerfully exposed in this brief yet intense film.