If any one programming section of the Pusan International Film Festival best represents its dedication to exploring every avenue of filmmaking, it's Wide Angle. This year, the section included more than 80 short subjects, documentaries and animated films. Seven of the feature-length Korean documentaries this year had connections to Japan. "Erotic Chaos Boy," for example, charted director Choi Jin Sung's own love affair with a Japanese woman who is also a documentary filmmaker. "NoGaDa" explored the way construction workers in both Japan and Korea are exploited.
"Annyong Sayonara," this year's cowinner of the Woonpa Fund award for best South Korean documentary, was in fact a joint Korean-Japanese production. Co-directed by veteran documentarist Kim Tae Il and Japanese filmmaker Kumiko Kato, the film looks at Yasukuni Shrine through the experiences of Lee Hee Ja, a 62-year-old Korean woman trying to remove her father's name from the list of soldiers enshrined there, and Masaki Furukawa, a Kobe municipal employee who helps Koreans bring lawsuits against the Japanese government.
"In Korea, Yasukuni is a symbol of evil," Kato says in her Tokyo office, having just returned from PIFF and the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, where the movie was also screened. "But they don't really know what it is. We wanted to show them that it's a controversial subject in Japan and that Japanese hold various opinions, that there are some who are working for peace." She adds that some supporters felt this angle might be misleading since "Japanese society is actually leaning rightward."