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Korean Cinema Focus: Tribute to Pusan International Film Festival

With the name, entitled "Korean Cinema Focus: Tribute to Pusan International Film Festival", the 7th Cinemanila International Film Festival, scheduled to be held over August 6-14 in the Philippines, holds a special section of the Pusan International Film Festival.

The Secretariat of this Film Festival said that the 7th Cinemanila International Film Festival prepares this special section to reilluminate Korean cinema and the Pusan International Film Festival.

Several Korean movies such as 'Untold Scandal', 'The Isle', ' JSA - Joint Security Area' and 'A Bittersweet Life" are goint to be screened. In addition, chairman Kim Dong-ho, the executive committee of the Pusan International Film Festival is scheduled to take part in this Festival next month.

Launched in 1996 as the first international film festival ever in Korea, PIFF has firmly established itself as the world's most energetic film festival and the greatest showcase of Asian cinema in a short period of time.

Untold Scandal (2003) is based on the novel 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses', this film is set in aristocratic 18th-century Korea at the end of the Chosun Dynasty.

The irresistible temptress Lady Cho asks her cad of a younger cousin, Jo-won, to deflower the innocent young Soh-ok, who is to become her husband's concubine. But, his attentions soon shift to the graceful and aloof Lady Sook, who lives according to her convictions as a Catholic.

Jo-won becomes obsessed with seducing this chaste woman who has remained celibate for nine years since her husband's death. However, conquering the most virtuous woman in the land proves to be more difficult than Chosun's notorious playboy expects.

The story of 'The Isle' takes place on a secluded bay with floating shacks where city folks come in ones or twos or threes for a fishing getaway. An unnamed woman wordlessly minds the bay, boating from guest to guest to provide food, coffee, furnishings and transportation.

And that's not all she provides. "Come on up", one customer orders on her delivery run. "We're going to need more than coffee". Without a complaint, she climbs up onto the platform and complies with his wishes. Other times, she merely arranges for prostitutes to come from the outside and do the dirty work.

'JSA - Joint Security Area', is based on the Park Sang-yeon novel "DMZ", "Joint Security Area" centers on a modern-day crossborder incident in this flashpoint of North-South tensions, specifically at the "Bridge of No Return', where prisoners-of-war were exchanged at the end of the Korean War.

Swiss military officer Major Sophie Jang (Lee Young-ae, who appeared most recently in "One Fine Spring Day"), the daughter of a Korean expatriate and a Swiss mother, arrives in Panmumjeom to conduct an impartial investigation of the incident, which has resulted in two deaths.

Nor surprisingly, both sides remain tight-lipped about the details of the incidentm and treat her investigation with suspicion.

'A Bittersweet Life' is dealing a story in which a high-ranking gang member who manages a hotel bar is asked by his boss to spy on his girlfriend, and kill her if she is being unfaithful.

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