Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival reveals 2024 line-up

South Korea’s Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (Bifan) has unveiled the full line-up for its 28th edition, which is set to open with Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding and close with Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.

The festival, running July 4 to 14, will screen 225 films from 49 countries, including 67 world premieres. Titles will also receive online screenings through local OTT platform wavve.

Love Lies Bleeding stars Kristen Stewart and marks the second feature of UK filmmaker Glass, whose Saint Maud won the Best Director Choice Feature award at Bifan in 2020. The film premiered at Sundance before playing Berlin earlier this year.

Fresh from Cannes, where it premiered in Midnight Screenings, Hong Kong action thriller Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In has been set as Bifan’s closer. The film has performed strongly in Hong Kong and mainland China, where it opened on May 1. It ranks as Hong Kong’s second highest-grossing domestic film ever, taking $10.5m (HK$82.5m).

This year’s Bucheon Choice: Features international competition lineup of eight films includes international premieres for Taiwan’s Suffocating Love, directed by Liao Ming Yi and Japan’s Tatsumi, directed by Hiroshi Shoji. Asian premieres include Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, which premiered at Berlin. Prize money totalling nearly $22,000 (KRW30m) will be awarded in the section.

Scroll down for full list of competition titles

Meanwhile, the Korean Fantastic: Features section for local genre films includes Kim Min-ha’s Idiot Girls And School Ghost: School Anniversary, which won the NAFF Korean Award at the festival’s Network of Asian Fantastic Films project market last year.

The festival previously announced Bifan+, a overarching “brand” which includes an AI section as well as industry platform B.I.G; XR content section Beyond Reality; and the Goedam Campus, an IP development incubator. The AI section will feature a film competition comprising 15 titles as well as a conference about AI film production and a “hackathon-style workshop”.

This year’s retrospective section is devoted to actor Son Yejin, whose career over two decades includes films such as A Moment To Remember, Spellbound and The Last Princess.

The festival will also feature appearances by veteran directors Kim Sung-soo, Johnnie To and Hideo Nakata, as well as Japanese screenwriter Koki Mitani. Nakata, a Japanese director known for horror films such as Ring, will reveal his latest project at the festival. Bifan will also feature a tribute to late US producer and director Roger Corman, including a lecture by critic Yu Un-sung.

City-wide events will include the third annual Carnival in July, featuring a dance parties, water gun fights, treasure hunts and free screenings of family-friendly films.

For the first time, Bifan’s opening ceremony will take place at the newly opened Bucheon Arts Center, a venue dedicated to classical music. The venue will also host the festival’s Bucheon Philharmonic Orchestra cinema music concert.

The Bifan Industry Gathering (BIG), comprising the Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF) project market, the Made in Asia forum and the NAFF Fantastic Film School workshop, is set to run July 6-9.

Titles at this year’s NAFF include projects from award-winning filmmakers Nelson Yeo, Patiparn Boontarig, Kenneth Dagatan and producers of Cannes drama Viet And Nam.

Bucheon Choice: Features competition

Cuckoo (Ger-US)Dir. Tilman Singer

Handling The Undead (Nor-Swe-Gre)Dir. Thea Hvistendahl

The Last Stop In Yuma County (US)Dir. Francis Galluppi

Oddity (Ire)Dir. Damian McCarthy

Respati (Indo)Dir. Sidharta Tata

Strange Darling (US)Dir. JT Mollner

Suffocating Love (Tai)Dir. Liao Ming Yi

Tatsumi (Japan)Dir. Hiroshi Shoji