The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, or better known as BiFan, in South Korea, offered the $14,000 (KRW15 million) Bucheon Award to The Twin, which marked the close on Tuesday of the 10th edition of NAFF. It has to be mentioned that the genre film project market has become an integral part of the festival.
Taneli Mustoonen and Aleksi Hyvarinen, the Finnish director and producer of The Twin thanked the Seoul bus driver who had paid their fare after the pair had become lost in the mega city with no money, no language skills, and two smart phones exhausted from taking photos all evening.
Other notable winners were Man of Sin, an ambitious thriller by first time Chinese writer-director Will Bu, which earned two prizes, and Imaginable, a Korea-U.S. animation by Chris Martin. Bu said it took him years to prepare his thank you speech, which he peppered with expletives and a warning about too much fame.
The NAFF market has now reached a scale and level of operational efficiency that it is now comfortable with co-operation with other project markets and genre festivals. These include the Sitges festival form Spain, the Ventana Sur market in Argentina and the HAF project market in Hong Kong.
It also rotates its annual spotlight to encourage genre and independent cinema in neighboring countries less developed than South Korea. This year the country focus was Vietnam. The Twin was sourced from another outreach program, called Nordic Invasion.
The 21st edition of the BiFan festival opened last Thursday (July 13) and it runs until July 23 and this year aims to show a total of 289 films from 58 countries.
#Peace.Love.TheTwin
