[Talk of the town] Missed a movie Busan festival to replay audience favorites

If you’re planning to visit Busan this summer, don’t miss out on some cinematic fun.

Cinematheque Pusan, a film center where both local and overseas films presented at Pusan International Film Festival are kept, kicked off Cine Replay 2008 last Tuesday.

Cine Replay is a small-scale film festival that screens the top seven films selected by audiences from last year to the first half of this year. The festival runs until Aug. 7.

Included are the French film “To Each His Own Cinema” (2007) directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos, the Japanese film “The Mourning Forest” (2007, photo) directed by Naomi Kawase and the U.S. film “Paranoid Park” (2007) directed by Gus Van Sant.

The center is near Haeundae Beach in Busan. Tickets are 4,000 won ($3.98). For the film schedule, call (051) 742-6377 or visit www.cinema.piff.org.

Celeb singer backs international Dokdo Islets awareness campaign

Singer Kim Jang-hun has been showing his support for one-man Korean PR machine, Seo Kyoung-duk.

Kim paid for an advertisement in July 9 issue of the New York Times that highlighted the territorial dispute concerning the Dokdo Islets. (Japan claims the land is theirs.)

The full-page ad wrote, “Do you know Dokdo is Korean territory?”

Seo has been publishing ads about Korea in worldwide newspapers since 2005. In addition to celebs like Kim, Korean netizens raise money for Seo, too.

They’ve collected around 30 million won for Seo’s next project, an advertising campaign about the ancient kingdoms of Goguryeo and Balhae.

The ad insists that “Goguryeo is part of Korean history and the Chinese government must acknowledge this fact.”

For more on these ads, visit www.forthenextgeneration.com.

U.S. singer’s singing in Korean (and it’s not Stephen Colbert)

American singer-songwriter Shay Bailiff, 21, is releasing an album titled “Odyssey,” which includes a Korean, English and acoustic tracks.

Bailiff, vocalist and guitarist with Thursday Night, an American underground rock band, sang some Korean songs and posted them on the Internet last year.

In no time, he became a YouTube star here. Some 100,000 Koreans clicked on the video.

KooPD, producer and guitarist, was so charmed he decided to produce some songs for Bailiff.

By Lee Eun-joo