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A local smartphone film festival that launched two years ago will go global this year by introducing an international section, its organizers said Tuesday.

The 3rd Olleh International Smartphone Film Festival will begin accepting submissions from overseas for its newly added international competition section from Friday, they said. The event under the motto that everyone can use their mobile phones to make films is scheduled for April 17-20.

  


Foreign applicants should upload their videos shot with a smartphone running less than 10 minutes, regardless of genre, on the festival's overseas agency site (www.withoutabox.com) by Feb. 28, according to the organizers.

In a press conference held Tuesday to promote the festival, Lee Joon-ik, an established filmmaker and chairman of the festival's executive committee, called it a "democratic" film festival.

"Movies are fast becoming an entertainment that everyone can make and enjoy themselves, and are no longer the exclusive property of a particular group of people," said the director of South Korea's 2005 box-office hit "The King and the Clown."

"This film festival aims for the future, making a new paradigm of movie contents for the 21st century in which competing films are submitted and screened on the Internet," he added.

Smartphones are fast becoming an option for professional filmmakers, too, in a country where over 60 percent of the country's population has smartphones.

The public interest in the use of smartphones for filmmaking began to grow when acclaimed South Korean director Park Chan-wook, best known for "Oldboy" (2003), and his brother Park Chan-kyong shot a short film on an iPhone 4 in 2011.

The brothers brought home the Golden Bear award of the International Short Film Jury at the 61st Berlin International Film Festival for the film "Night Fishing."

The festival has added a section for school children, in addition to the new international competition category. A total of 50 million won (US$46,189) in prize money is up for grabs in this year's festival.

Director Bong Joon-ho, the new jury president of the festival, said in a video message that he wants to see many imaginative and even "provocative" movies because it is a smartphone film festival.

He could not attend the press appearance because he was busy making his Hollywood debut film, "Snowpiercer," according to the organizers.

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Source: Yonhap News (Jan. 29, 2013)