As Cheng Kang’s [14 Amazons] is shown at this year’s Busan International Film Festival as a special screening, a Korean film [A Journey with Korean Masters] will be screened. It’s an omnibus film consisting of 5 shorts directed by 5 veteran Korean filmmakers that were once among the most prominent in the industry: Park Cheol-su, Byun Jangho, Lee Doo-yong, Lee Chang-ho and Jung Ji-young. It is a modest project about Seoul, produced by the A Journey with Korean Masters Production Committee. In this film, the masters collaborate with a wealth of actors of varying generations in promoting the city, integrating its past and present throughout the film. This special screening is an excellent chance to enjoy the hallmarks that define these mature, highly experienced directors. Although some may be familiar, others have not been in the public eye for almost twenty years.
Beautiful and raw combination of lyricism and realism in debut drama about a woman with cancer running to her gorgeous, polluted home island to face herself. When Noelia finds out that her cancer has spread, she sets aside the search for new procedures and abruptly goes from San Juan back to Vieques, the island where she grew up in southwest Puerto Rico. At home with her mother, in this place with which she is intimately tied (where the beaches are as marvelous as the sea is polluted, in the traces of US colonialism), she seeks her individual strength and takes part in environmental activism one last time. At the same time, a hurricane approaches. Glorimar Marrero Sánchez creates her own visual language in a film that tells us about disfigured bodies and land, and that both enchants and simplifies. A magnificent Isabel Rodriguez in the leading role gives Noelia dignity and an enormous power. And mediates that there is also a light in grief.
