Busan film festival concludes

Asia's most prestigious film festival came to an end in South Korea's southeastern port city of Busan on Friday with a awarding ceremony thronged with spectators despite drizzle. Local and international stars hit the red carpet to celebrate the successful finish of the 16th Busan International Film Festival. Movie fans seeking to savor the last day of the film event swarmed the Busan Cinema Center, the festival's new permanent venue. The nine-day event closed with the screening of "Chronicle of My Mother" by Japanese director Masato Harada. The movie delves into the story of a son's estranged relationship with his mother who suffers from dementia. The film festival's top award for the first or second film from Asian filmmakers was presented to Iranian director Morteza Farshbaf's "Mourning" and Filipino director Loy Arcenas's "Ni? o." "Mourning" is about a deaf couple who are struggling with the effort of how to tell their nephew that his parents have died in a car accident, while they are traveling to Tehran to reunite him with his parents. "Ni?o" follows the story of a family entangled by greed, set within the world of opera. The two directors received a prize of 30,000 U.S. dollars each given in the New Currents competition. The festival's Flash Forward award for new non-Asian filmmakers went to Italian director Guido Lombardi's "La Bas A Criminal Education," which looks at the contemporary issue of migration. Lombardi also won a cash prize of 30,000 U.S. dollars. This year's film festival heralded the beginning of a new era, with new leadership and the opening of the 140 million U.S. dollars Busan Cinema Center. The 16th festival was the first to be headed by new director Lee Yong-kwan following the resignation of founding director Kim Dong-ho. This year's festival displayed 307 films from 70 countries and regions, attracting a total of 196,177 theater visitors. On the market side, 177 companies from 28 countries and regions participated in the Asian Film Market held annually on the sidelines of the film festival and designed to link Asian filmmakers with international distributors and buyers.