Each year since I moved from Oregon to South Korea in 2008, I have attended the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan; http://www.bifan.kr/eng/index.asp), which asserts itself to be Asia's largest showcase of genre films. With more than 200 feature-length and short films on offer each July, the fest certainly makes a good case for its claim. Movies range from cutting-edge titles making their world premiere to beloved classics from around the world. There's something for almost everyone as the festival focuses on horror, science fiction, fantasy, dark comedy, thrillers, crime, action and martial arts, and other genres.
This year will be my eighth visit to BiFan but, most importantly, it is my fourth visit to BiFan with my son Cohen and our second time to write an article together about the festival for The Phantom of the Movies' VideoScope magazine (http://videoscopemag.com/), with our debut as a father-and-son writing team appearing in the publication's Fall 2013 (#88) edition.
The festival opens this coming Thursday, July 16, and I will attend every day beginning the following evening. Besides this being my fourth year of BiFan coverage for VideoScope, it will also be my second year of providing audio reports as the foreign correspondent for the excellent Horror News Radio (HNR) podcast (http://www.docrotten.com/) and as a writer for Horrornews.net (HNN).
I will post trailers here for the films I plan to see. Expect to see many trailers, because I hope to check out at least 25 films at BiFan! I will also post links to HNR and HNN when podcasts with my reviews and my online reviews are published, respectively.
This is my favorite cinematic time of the year, so I thought now would be the perfect time to kick off my blog. After all of the festival coverage, I will publish links to previous podcast appearances and articles, as well as reviews of films that are exclusive to this blog, trailers and news, and other fun tidbits. Please join me!
BiFan: Friday, July 17
My first film for this year's festival will be the Hong Kong crime thriller Port of Call, written and directed by Philip Yung and starring Aaron Kwok.
Note: the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) was formerly named the Pucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan). The festival changed the spelling this year to reflect the revised English spelling of the city's name.
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