The Great Escape

Film writer Matthew Scott talks about the escapist nature of cinema — and how reality sometimes can poop the party

many years ago I had a reputation as a young man who didn’t take matters seriously enough. I long thought it unfair, though admit now there were a few (scattered!) moments when you could say I was guilty as charged.

Most obvious was the time — pre-smartphones — when my brother suffered a rather horrific broken arm while playing football and after the game I returned home to shower and get ready for a night out on the town, then left a note for my parents informing them Andrew, their cherished firstborn, had “been taken to the horsepiddle”. I added no further information.

I thought it all hilarious until met by my father, belt off and ready for war, when I returned drunk at 2am. He’d spent hours not knowing what was going on. Fortunately, in those days, I was nimble of foot and escaped his wrath.

But the trait seems to have stuck and it reared its head again during the last Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), the region’s largest and most important event of its kind.

It was there in South Korea I started to realise perhaps this habit was one reason I gravitated towards writing about cinema. Hard news was not for me. The topics you face up on-screen are often frighteningly real, as are the people you meet, of course, but the fact that they are over “there” (onscreen, in an interview) allows a certain disconnect from reality for those who’d rather not face it.

It’s also, of course, one of the great things about cinema — through it we are able to escape — and it was why on the final morning of BIFF’S 10 days I was tucked away in the darkness watching Japanese maverick Takashi Miike’s samurai mash-up Blade of the Immortal. It’s his 100th film, based on a famous manga and preposterous.

To grab the attention of the younger crowd, Miike cast some noodle-armed J-pop stars in roles where once the genre gave us actors you believed were hard-nut killers, among them the force of nature that was Toshiro Mifune. Pre-acting, Mifune had spent time during WWII training kamikaze pilots, before sending these youngsters off to their doom. That experience tends to add gravitas to whatever you do afterwards. But Blade of the Immortal is pure wonderful escapism and perfect because the realities of the modern world weighed heavily on BIFF, as they have for the past three years.

Political meddling in the arts has become frighteningly commonplace — Hong Kong included — and BIFF has been hit since 2014 by funding cuts, and accusations of malpractice that brought down a few who had toiled for years to make the event as important as it is. BIFF had screened a documentary about the Sewol ferry disaster that claimed more than 300 lives in 2014 — one that was critical of how now-disgraced Park Geun Hye’s government handled the tragedy — despite being warned not to.

BIFF has struggled to escape the political shadow cast by Park and her cohorts but its backroom staff have remained steadfast to present a platform for the emerging stars of independent Asian cinema, and they’ve much succeeded, too, despite the odds being stacked against them.

BIFF’S programme has continued to present politically charged films, and in October sensitive, controversial topics tackled included a documentary about asbestos poisoning in Japan (Kazuo Hara’s Sennan Asbestos Disaster) and the state of morality in modern China in Chinese director Li Xiaofeng’s bleak thriller Ash.

There were good news by festival’s end. New South Korean president Moon Jae-in made a very public appearance at BIFF that was widely interpreted by local press as a sign he would be throwing the government’s full weight behind the festival once again. It was a brave move when Moon could have simply stayed quiet — hidden away even — and pretended it was someone else’s problem. The hope now is that full artistic freedom will resume and the BIFF’S future will be assured.