The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival is an annual event held in Bucheon, about a thirty-minute drive west of Seoul. Since its inception in 1997, it has established itself as a gathering for both domestic and international fans of horror, science fiction, thriller, and mystery films.
If it reminds you of the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, you are not far off from its core conception as a film festival. The 28th edition of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, or BiFan, concluded on July 14th, featuring the Hong Kong film Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024) by Soi Cheang as its closing film. (The film’s backdrop is the now demolished Kowloon Walled City, once a notorious slum. The movie was introduced as a neo-noir martial arts crime action film when it was selected for the Official Selection of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.)
This year, BiFan introduced a new competition category, Bucheon Choice: AI Film, which aimed to celebrate excellence in films using AI technologies. Fifteen films competed in this category, a small number compared to the 225 films from 49 countries shown at the festival. The honor of Best AI Film went to Where Do Grandmas Go When They Get Lost? directed by Léo Cannone. This beautifully animated film ponders what comes after death from a young girl’s point of view. Its movement is poetic, and the narration is touching, addressing the sensitive subject by exploring the connection between the afterlife and nature. It doesn’t feel like a usual BiFan film except that it is produced with AI technologies.
However, the love affair between new technologies and horror, mystery, and science fiction films is not new. In the 1950s, horror films discovered the possibility of 3-D technology for a shock effect to thrill viewers. To name but a few, House of Wax (1953), It Came from Outer Space (1953), The Maze (1953), Robot Monster (1953), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) relished in the optical effect of three-dimension to create the illusion of things popping out from the screen into the auditorium. In House of Wax, the street barker, played by Reggie Rymal, entertains the crowd on the pleasure ground with his paddle ball, and the ball, attached to the wooden racket by an elastic thread, flies from his chest to the audience and back to him. The ball, just optically though, breaks the barrier of the screen, a space of fiction, and the theater, a space of reality. This effect of fiction spilling into reality culminates in the scene where the wax figures are on fire. The shock of the 1950s 3-D horror films was the unexpected intrusion of technology into real life.
BiFan’s adoption of Bucheon Choice: AI Film seems to be a strategic response to the increasing use of AI technologies in visual content production.
As a film festival whose main role, among many, is to showcase the newest trends, it must have been an inevitable decision to launch the AI film category. But it may not just be circumstantial to reach such a decision, AI being a source of great expectations for future development as well as a cause for concerns that it encroaches upon something very human and will replace, or further rule over, humanity entirely. AI is becoming a real-life horror story, which, by the way, is a specialty of BiFan. Whether out of consideration for its creative possibilities or its potential devastating consequences for humanity, BiFan opening its doors to AI-themed films was only a matter of time.
The narrative surrounding AI encompasses various aspects, spanning from ethical dilemmas to military implications. The concern over AI-supported search engines being racially and gender biased is alarming, but it pales in comparison to the possibility of AI-controlled warfare leading to total annihilation. The true fear of AI is likely that this technology will take center stage and relegate humans to mere accessories. Ultimately, it might confuse the lines between human and technology, presenting the immensely difficult task of redefining what constitutes humanity and what falls under technology. This situation also applies to the film industry in principle, reflecting the growing influence and integration of AI technologies in creative endeavors. Considering the film that won this year’s Bucheon Choice, we may not need to answer the question just yet. However, it feels as though the clock has already started ticking, and the question will arrive at our doorstep sooner than anticipated.
