Earlier this year, Kim Dong Ho announced that the 15th Pusan International Film Festival, which ran from Oct. 7 to 15, would be his final one as the event's director. Kim launched PIFF in 1986 and quickly made it the most important Asian film event of the annual calendar. As a farewell gesture, the traditional trailer that precedes every screening was this year a cartoon showing how Kim used to cut through Busan's notorious traffic jams to get from one end of the festival to another on the back of a delivery scooter.

Kim is retiring due to age, and indeed the festival seems to need new blood. Though the South Korean film market is doing better after a mid-decade slump, PIFF faces budgetary problems and an apathetic central government. PIFF was once the pride of Korea, a festival that represented to the world Asia's most vibrant movie industry, and even this year it offered a record 101 world premieres out of 308 films from 67 countries. But the government in Seoul is said to be no longer sympathetic to PIFF's needs. Busan is traditionally a leftwing town, and the government of President Lee Myung Bak leans heavily to the right.

Consequently, the choice of Zhang Yimou's "Under the Hawthorn Tree" to open the festival sent mixed signals. Zhang is the most successful director to emerge from the so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers who dominated Chinese cinema in the 1980s. "Hawthorn" is a return to the simple narrative style of Zhang's earlier films after a string of historical blockbusters and directing the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It's a love story between two young city people sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, but as Zhang said at the film's press conference, "I put the political element as much in the background as possible."