[HanCinema's Korea Diaries] "Bucheon" July 24th-25th

The Bucheon B-boy International Championships (부천 세계 비보이 대회) were held from July 22nd to July 24th this year, overlapping with the early part of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival. They were also conveniently located right next to one of the screening venues, at Bucheon Station (부천역). Alas, I was not able to figure this out until the last day. That much is a real shame, because how often does a person get the chance to watched masked violinists breakdance the night away?

B-boy, by the way, is just the official word for breakdancing. It's very popular in South Korea. Why? Well, really, the better question is why not? It looks cool, and the music is hip. Besides that, just look at their faces. These guys absolutely love what they do.

Look at the guys in the background there. They're on the opposite team as the guy with red shoes doing that crazy...twirl around thing that Bboy performers do all the time. The guy on the left is all "dang this guy has moves I don't know if we can win", and the guy on the right is all "aw yeah that's some sick moves bro". Now that's what I call a real spectator sport.

My admiration for the skills and enthusiasm of B-boyers is only somewhat mitigated by the difficulty of photographing them with any level of accuracy. B-boy by its nature looks cool precisely because the performers move so incredibly fast. It really is a format that requires you physically be present to fully appreciate the work that goes into the process.

...And appreciate it the people of Bucheon did. There can be now greater compliment to the popularity of an event than that the crowd outnumbers the available seats by such a high degree that they create a fire hazard. And these aren't even the finals- I had to leave early to go to another engagement. But rest assured, there were B-boy battles long into the night.

The Bucheon International Comics Festival (부천국제만화국제) started on July 27th. I'm not actually there yet, but I made a point of scoping out the Korea Manhwa Museum (한국박물관) ahead of time, lest I repeat my embarrassment of missing out on the B-boys. Here we see cosplayers walking west to the Korea Manhwa Museum. Specifically, they're cosplaying No-Face from Spirited Away, a character which shows up a lot in the South Korean cosplay scene I've noticed.

There are others, as you can see. Not that I have the slightest clue who the rest of them are. It's hard enough trying to keep up with everything in Korean culture without having to get into obscure stuff like (what I'm assuming) are characters from Japanese arcade fighting games. Again, this is all a consequence of Bucheon's making a point to be about everything fantastic. And I'm not using that as a generic superlative, but rather in the more literal sense of "marked by weirdness". This kind of culture is unique...yes, that is probably the best possible word for it.

Really, if there's any advice I can give to someone going to a film festival, it's to make sure to pay attention to stuff that is not on the program. Any halfway decent film festival is going to have plenty going on in the background like this, because that's what a festival should all be about is the sheer spontaneity. The films are just an excuse to pull together all this weird stuff in the same general area. Kudos to the city of Bucheon for getting that and managing to pull together such an impressive rogue's gallery of offbeat cultural events.

- William Schwartz

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