BUSAN, South Korea, Oct 8, (Agencies): After the fanfare of opening night Asia’s premier film festival got down to business in the South Korean port city of Busan Friday with a boundary-busting programme of regional cinema.
An array of international film stars dazzled on the red carpet as the 15th Pusan International Film Festival kicked off Thursday evening with an outdoor screening of Chinese’s director Zhang Yimou’s “Under the Hawthorn Tree”.
Thousands of screaming fans welcomed South Korean heartthrobs such as Won Bin and Lee Yo-Won, while attention also focused on Kim Yun-Jin, star of the hit US TV series “Lost”, Japanese starlet Yu Aoi and Chinese star Tang Wei.
Tang told a news conference Friday she believes she has come back a stronger, more mature person — and actress — after the controversy that swirled around her role in director Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution.”

Tang had been loath to discuss the subject, but at the press conference held to launch her latest role — in Korean’s director Kim Tae-Yong’s “Late Autumn” — there was no escaping her past.
Tang acknowledged that she had been through some tough times following intense criticism in China over her portrayal in Lee’s film of a woman who sleeps with a Japanese sympathiser during World War II.
The production also featured Tang in some graphic nude scenes with co-star Tony Leung. “I believe every day I am growing up as a person and as an actress,” Tang said.
Director Kim said he believed the controversy had left its mark on the 31-year-old Tang, but he was happy for his own film that it had done so.
“My interpretation is that she has really grown up because of the experience of ‘Lust, Caution’,” he said.
“I had seen her in that film and thought her character was just so powerful. I thought at first she would be too strong to play in my film but three years has passed and she has changed.”
Late Autumn has already created quite a stir in Busan, pairing Tang with South Korean idol Hyun Bin in a tale of two lovelorn foreigners who meet by chance in the American city of Seattle.

Eclectic
The festival offers an eclectic line-up of films and special events laid out for the more than 150,000 film lovers expected to flock to town before it closes on Oct 15.
Hollywood heavyweights Oliver Stone and Willem Dafoe are also due in town, along with Bollywood golden couple Aishwarya Rai and her husband Abhishek Bachchan, and French actress Juliette Binoche.
The festival was founded to promote Asia’s vast independent filmmaking scene and it offers a main jury prize of 30,000 dollars — the New Currents award — to two first or second time Asian directors.
This year there are 13 films vying for the award from as far afield as Iraq and Vietnam.
Heading the jury is Japanese costume designer Emi Wada, 73, who won an Oscar for her work on Akira Kirosawa’s “Ran”.
“When judging these films we have to look at what significance will they have in the history of cinema,” she said.
The New Currents award will be announced on October 15.
One of the most anticipated sections at the festival this year is entitled “Kurdish Cinema: The Unconquered Spirit”, which focuses on an ethnic minority spread throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.
“Kurdish cinema does not have industry or national cinema per se,” explained Cho Young-Jung, who has programmed the festival’s Kurdish section which includes eight films from eight directors.
“This programme, I hope, will bring the new understanding of Asian history and new boundary for Asian cinema.”

Attention
There are also programmes turning their attention to South Korea‚Äôs up-and-coming film-makers and a buzz surrounds the Korean Cinema Today section, which features films from some of the country’s hottest directors.
In this section, experimental film-maker Inan makes his feature debut with “Ordinary Days” — a look at the everyday life of a group of modern Korean citizens — while Jeon Kyu-Hwan returns with “Dance Town”, the third in his “Town” series of films, which have been hits at festivals around the world.
The festival also promotes the often neglected Asian documentary scene through its Wide Angle programme which this year features 26 feature productions and a series of short films.
They cover topics as diverse as the fate of a coal-mining town in China (“New Castle”) to the life of a young Kashmiri footballer (“Inshallah, Football”).

Kim Yun-jin is making a homecoming of sorts this week at South Korea’s Pusan International Film Festival.
The 36-year-old Korean-American actress recently completed her six-year stint on the hit American TV series, which aired its finale in May. She is now plunging back into the Asian movie industry where she first made her name.
At Pusan, Asia’s leading film festival, she is serving as a juror for the event’s New Currents prize for emerging Asian filmmakers.
“American audiences have very little knowledge of Asian film in general. ... Hopefully international film festivals such as Pusan will change that in the future,” Kim told a news conference on Friday, appearing with her fellow jurors.
Kim, who was born in Seoul but moved to the U.S. at age 10, shot to fame in her native land by playing an undercover North Korean spy in the hit 1999 thriller “Shiri.”

She kept working on South Korean productions while juggling her “Lost” duties. “It was always a pleasure coming back and working on a Korean movie,” she said.
Her most recent Korean release came in January with the drama “Harmony,” about four female prisoners who bond over a choir group.
Looking back at “Lost,” the convoluted, time-jumping tale of a group of plane crash survivors facing mysterious phenomena, Kim called the experience “life-changing.”
“It was a new type of drama,” she said. “In my humble opinion, when there is a discussion about U.S. television shows in the 21st century, ‘Lost’ will be one of them, so I’m really proud to be part of that TV show.”