Film reconfigures the ways in which the world is perceived. As the site where this perception takes shape, landscape is a place where past time and present life overlap. Time, history, and lived experience exist as conditions that shape the rhythm and images of cinema. –scape is a section that explores cinema’s distinctive landscapes, the worlds they construct, and the cinematic language that emerges within them. It also reflects the Busan Inter-City Film Festival’s tenth anniversary and its attempt to engage with cinematic perception from a broader perspective. This year’s program presents Zhang Lu’s Mothertongue and Kaori Oda’s Béla Tarr in Fukushima. Chengdu and Fukushima function as places marked by accumulated time, memory, and lived experience. In Mothertongue, Zhang Lu shifts attention away from narrative incident to the emotional trajectory of his characters. The streets and spaces of Chengdu, repeatedly transformed by cycles of development, prosperity, and decline, come to assume the presence of another character. Béla Tarr in Fukushima reflects on those rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of disaster, and on the camera’s relationship to them through the framework of Béla Tarr’s workshop. Together, these films reveal how cinematic language takes shape through what has disappeared, what remains, and the interplay between changing places and enduring lives. We invite audiences to follow these cinematic landscapes and encounter new ways of perceiving the world through the worlds that cinema creates.
GIM Jiyeon