Jeonju International Film Festival

Samsara is the Buddhist cycle of death and reincarnation. From the temples of Laos, we will accompany a soul in its transit from one body to another through the bardo.

After a chance meeting, a man and a woman stroll through Seoul’s changing streets.

In 1978, five leftist youths who believed that the leftist revolution could be realized through politics, not violence, gathered in a house and started to talk about the magazine they had published. The unexpected events that take place later that night reveal the political chaos in Turkey before the 1980 coup d'état.

An old woman flies past six floors after jumping from the roof of her apartment block. Six stories on the poor state of humanity, told with humour and rare imagination to the accompaniment of a pulsating soundtrack from Amon Tobin. A woeful burlesque set in the present by one of Europe’s most original contemporary filmmakers.

A man awakes to find himself trapped in a dirty, confined crawlspace. He barely has enough room to move. He also has no memory of why he's there, or why he's bleeding from a stomach wound. Apparently drugged, he occasionally 'zones out' of his surroundings as he tries to edge towards his way to freedom. But the more he explores, the more pain he has to endure, and the more frightening his predicament becomes.

Novelist Jeong-seok is looking for his missing wife. A woman appears in front of him and suggests that she can find his wife. Meanwhile, some people approach him and ask him to find missing people. They find themselves becoming chased at some point.

A housemaid, working in an exclusive gated community in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, embarks on a journey of sexual and mental liberation in a nudist swinger-club boarding the high security walls.

You earn as much as you work, and you live off that money. This simple proposition has always been a problem for Jung-cheol. At the soybean paste factory he went to work for in the bitter winter, he dreams of travelling to warm Philippines in spring - as long as he survives the winter making his portion of the soybean paste that he promised the boss. But the more he struggles to live, the worse it gets. And soon, the fermentation room turns musty with the black mold spreading from the thousands of ferment boiled soybean lumps.

Hong Sang-Soo’s Lost in the Mountains (South Korea, 32min) the visitor is the supremely self-centred Mi-Sook, who drives to Jeonju on impulse to see her classmate Jin-Young – only to discover that her friend is having an affair with their married professor, who Mi-Sook once dated herself. The level of social embarrassment goes off the scale. In Naomi Kawase’s Koma (Japan, 34min), Kang Jun-Il travels to a village in rural Japan to honour his grandfather’s dying wish by returning a Buddhist scroll to its ancestral home. Amid ancient superstitions, a new relationship forms. And in Lav Diaz’ Butterflies Have No Memories (Philippines, 42min) ‘homecoming queen’ Carol returns to the economically depressed former mining town she came from – and becomes the target of an absurd kidnapping plot hatched by resentful locals. Serving as his own writer, cameraman and editor, Diaz casts the film entirely from members of his crew and delivers a well-seasoned mix of social realism and fantasy. —bfi

Hong Sang-soo's Lost in the Mountains depicts Mi-sook's suffering when she discovers her friend Jin-young has been secretly sleeping with her lover.

Chang-seok's marriage failed and he is about to publish a novel based on his own experience. After he meets various people, Chang-seok changes his mind and starts weaving yet another story.

Direct Action documents the everyday of one of the most important activist communities in France in order to see how the success of a radical protest movement can offer a path through the climate crisis facing us all.

A middle-age couple visit a temple in Chuncheon where they spent their first night together 30 years prior. On the way, one of them cannot find their phone and hurries to find it. As the night unravels, they will come across an ex-lover, a friend, and a young couple who resemble them 30 years ago.

Maria travels to Puerto Williams to star in a movie. But the film crew won't be able to arrive due to a strong storm. Alone, she'll seek help for severe back pain, which will lead her to discover life in the southernmost city in the world and a pending story in her life.

Kawase explores the fragile and often tense history between Korea and Japan through the relationship that develops between a third generation Korean-Japanese man, who unexpectedly visits the small and quiet village of Koma, and a Japanese woman, a somewhat mysterious inhabitant of the village.

High school student Min-sik moves to a rural village with his family. There he meets Ye-joo, a classmate who became a social outcast after her father was accused of murder.

A young Czech theater director has an ambition to adapt Eurypides' Phaedra. However, having affair with the actress, he puts his marriage at risk and the play turns to be a fiasco. Desperate, he tries to be the best possible father and husband. Not a perfect one.

Pedro Costa's segment from the Jeonju film "Memories".

One of three films commissioned by the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2006. It is a short film based on Beauty and an Airplane, a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ratanaruang's film tells the story of a man (Ananda Everingham) who falls in love with a woman (Khemapsom Sirisukha) he sees at the check-in counter of an airport. Most of the film takes place in the sleek blackened interior of the plane's cabin -- the camera panning between the two seats, lighting now one, now the other of the occupants. The two passengers never exchange a word, title cards occasionally allowing us to know what the man is thinking. Those familiar only with his work on Dumplings or Wong Kar-wai's films might be surprised at cinematographer Christopher Doyle's uncustomary restraint. Christopher Doyle doubles as both taxi driver and captain in the film.

Between reproaches over past problems that were never resolved and the uncertainty of a future that is relentlessly coming closer, a young couple takes a trip that will leave them at the beginning of a new life.