PIFF

Hi Everyone!

This weekend Jesse and I headed South for the Busan (formally Pusan - P and B are basically the same sound in Korean so the romanization changes) International Film Festival, or PIFF, for short. Jesse is much more of a movie buff than I am so this trip was really exciting for him. He went online the second tickets went on sale and got tickets to a bunch of movies and would check back daily and got more tickets through cancellations. He wanted to see a lot of movies each day, but I would hit my limit around two movies a day so, for a couple movies, he just went by himself.



We took the KTX (high-speed train) from Seoul to Busan on Friday night and got in to Busan around midnight. Jesse wanted to get up at 5 in the morning to line up for some extra movie tickets so we went to sleep right away. Unfortunately, Jesse forgot to set his alarm so he didn't wake up until 7, missing the morning line-up.

His first movie was Cruel Season - a documentary about Korean sanitation workers. We had actually been curious about them since we got here because the garbage here is picked up, not by garbage trucks, but by random people with these little carts that they just push through the streets. Apparently, they actually are employees of the sanitation department but the job has no respect and people constantly push them and yell at them and tell them they aren't allowed to speak - it sounds pretty awful.

The next one he saw was Son of Babylon - an Iraqi movie about a boy trying to find his father who had been missing since the Gulf War. This ended up being his favorite movie of the festival.

While he was at these first two movies, I met my friend Jenn and we had lunch and walked all around Busan, which was lots of fun.

At 5:00, we had a movie together called Archipelago. It was a British movie and I really enjoyed it. It was about a family and the son was going to Africa to volunteer - really good.

After that, we had to rush to our next movie, which was an outdoor movie, seating 5000 people. It was neat to sit outside and see a movie. It was like being at a drive-in, minus the cars. The movie was called Here Comes the Bride and it was from the Philippines. It was a totally insane movie about 5 people who switch bodies during a solar eclipse. It was a comedy and was really weird. What surprised me the most was that, Filipino sounds like English and Spanish mixed together. Half of it was just English talking but, apparently, that's what the language sounds like.

The Outdoor Theatre

After the movie we just walked around downtown and checked out Busan. We went to a casino and played some slot machines. I was pretty sure I was a slot machine expert after winning $60 my first time at a casino but this time I lost $30... oh well.

Jesse at the Canadian party, walking the red carpet... not really

The next day, we saw two movies. The first was a New Zealand film called Desert but it was about Koreans living in New Zealand so it was mainly in Korean. It was pretty good.

The next one was the weirdest and least enjoyable one we saw. It was called Little Baby Jesus of Flandr and was a Belgian movie about these three guys who see a baby being born in the forest and think it's Jesus. The actors all had Downs Syndrome and it was filmed in black and white but it was far too artistic to be interesting. It had crazy screeching music for the whole thing and the story was bizarre and it had these really long shots of trees for, like ten minutes at a time. Neither of us liked it very much but it was interesting anyway.

After that, we went to see the famous Busan fish market which is one of the sights you must see while in Korea and is arguably the smelliest place on earth. It was cool to see, just thousands and thousands of tanks with crazy sea creatures that you can just buy and have cut up on the spot.




After the fish market, we caught the train back to Seoul and that was the end of the weekend.

All in all, we had a great time!

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada!
Ali and Jesse