JEONJU IFF’s International Competition section presents ten Asian premieres of first or second features by emerging directors selected through preliminary evaluation.
Documentaries had a strong presence in previous years, but this year’s International Competition showcases feature films with a wide range of perspectives and experimental films with unique aesthetics.

The selection includes East Asian films such as China's Absence, starring the familiar Lee Kang-Sheng plays a lead role filled with loneliness, and There is a Stone, which captures everything from insignificant little stories to the tide of emotions that come from a woman and a man who meet by chance near a stream and search a pebble thrown into the water while they play a stone skipping. Also, it includes Türkiye's Almost Entirely a Slight Disaster, which portrays the worries and anxieties faced by the Turkish youth through the intimate relationships between the characters and Denmark's The Quiet Migration, directed by Malene CHOI and inspired by her internal struggles of identity growing up in a quiet rural Danish town with her adoptive parents. Argentina's beautiful black and white film About the Clouds features four leads with nothing in common except the city they inhabit. The International Competition features rising directors' captivating new perspectives on internal narratives.

The selection also features films with bold images, sounds, and music that attempt to break free from pre-existing frameworks. Such as Canada's Desvío de noche (Night Detour), a story of a journalist searching for a famous figure skater who suddenly disappears with mystical images, and Spain's H, which creates an unusual experience through intense visuals portraying the chaos of Running of the Bulls in Pamplona in Pamplona and the death of a man named H. Lastly, France's After depicts the youth through an afterparty in a Parisian club filled with eardrum-smashing techno music and frenzied dancing.
On the other hand, the French documentary Orlando, My Political Biography, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, shows that gender affirmation does not simply deal with gender but can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Ukraine’s Sashenka, sets in the Soviet 1960s and 70s, illustrates a tragic life of a character through incredible acting and restrained black-and-white imagery, which notably reflects the reality of today’s war-torn Ukraine. The 24th JEONJU IFF thus introduces these ten exciting features in the International Competition section that represent various genres.

Programmer CHUN Jinsu