BIFF

Nampo-dong had cinemas going back to the colonial period, and by the 1990s it was a slightly faded district of old screens. In 1996, a group of Korean film people launched the Busan International Film Festival there — at a moment when Korean cinema was barely known outside Korea.

The timing turned out to be extraordinary. Korean film went from marginal to globally dominant over the following twenty-five years, and BIFF was the platform that introduced a great deal of it — along with Iranian, Taiwanese, Japanese and Southeast Asian work that had nowhere else to be seen at that scale.

The old cinema district is now BIFF Square: handprints of directors in the pavement, and the best street food in the city on top of them.

The building

The festival outgrew Nampo-dong and in 2011 moved its centre to the Busan Cinema Center in Centum City — a structure whose roof cantilevers about eighty-five metres out over an open-air plaza with no supports beneath it, holding a Guinness record for the longest such roof.

The underside of that roof is a single vast LED surface. At night it runs animation over the heads of several thousand people watching a film outdoors. It is the most impressive piece of public architecture in the city and it is free to stand under.

What this means for a port day

The festival runs for about ten days in early October. If your call falls inside it, the city is at its best — screenings, crowds, outdoor events, and a genuine sense of occasion.

If it does not, BIFF Square is still where you should eat. The handprints are in the ground, the old cinemas are still operating, and the stalls that grew up around the festival crowds are the reason the ssiat hotteok exists.