On the Way into the Digital Future – The Jeonju Digital Project

The founding of the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2000 coincided with the arrival of the first digital video cameras and the beginning of a period of media upheaval in cinema. The South Korean festival took this into account and initiated the Jeonju Digital Project to “create teasers for the films of the future that inspire us” and to sound out the aesthetic potential of the new digital format. As part of the Jeonju Digital Project, three medium-length films were commissioned each year from 2000 to 2013 from filmmakers above all from Asia, but also from Europe, Africa and the Americas, and then combined to form a feature-length, sometimes thematically connected program. In 2014, the Jeonju Digital Project became the Jeonju Cinema Project. By this time, the digital format was no longer a novelty but rather the standard, which led to the focus being shifted on to the production of low-budget features.

To honor the work of the Jeonju International Film Festival and to give audiences the opportunity to see frequently less known medium-length films by renowned directors, Arsenal is showing a selection of 11 programs from the Jeonju Digital Project and a feature-length film from Jeonju Cinema Project, which is supposed to mark the continuity of the program. The programs include works by Shinji Aoyama, James Benning, Pedro Costa, Denis Côté, Claire Denis, Lav Diaz, Harun Farocki, Eugène Green, Bahman Ghobadi, José Luis Guerín, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Matías Piñeiro, Jean-Marie Straub, Hong Sang-soo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. We’re happy to welcome Sung Moon from JIFF to Arsenal on 11.2.  (Birgit Kohler)

An event in cooperation with the Jeonju International Film Festival.