It's more than a little ironic that the current economic crisis in Korea has come at a time when the country's film culture is in such good shape, with Korean cinema playing a significant part in the programme of this year's Forum.
Nobody knows for sure how badly the economic crisis will affect the film industry, but it clearly won't help an already difficult situation. Last year saw the Korean industrial conglomerates starting to withdraw from their investments in film production: there had been too many expensive mistakes, too many marketing and distribution misjudgements. The upside of the won's devaluation is that foreign sales of Korean films are bringing in dollars worth nearly twice as much as four months ago - recent sales of Motel Cactus to Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong have brought the film into profit.
The Korean public has an insatiable appetite for everything from Hollywood blockbusters to Kiarostami and Tarkovsky. Two international festivals - one in Pusan, with a focus on Asian cinema, the other in Puchon, with a focus on fantastic cinema - are packed from start to finish. Local cinema history is being excavated and celebrated for the first time, as in the rediscovery of the late Kim Ki-Young, subject of a mini-retrospective here in the Forum. And Korea's directors are now making more varied and more adventurous movies than ever before.
This year's Forum programme offers a good cross-section of the new current. Byun Young-Joo's documentaries The Murmuring and Habitual Sadness speak frankly for the first time about 'comfort women' - the women forced into prostitution for the Japanese Army in WWII. Yoon In-Ho's feature Barricade  confronts Korean racism towards immigrant workers from other Asian countries. Jang Yoon-Hyun's The Contact hustles a nervous romance into the internet age. And Motel Cactus offers a forlorn but tender account of the space between sex and love - Park Ki-Yong's debut feature, distinctively shot by Chris Doyle, strikes a rare balance between formal control and sensuous imagery.
The piece de resistance though, is Jang Sun-Woo's Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie, a two-and-a-half-hour foray into the world of delinquent street kids and winos which achieves everything that Larry Clark botched in kids. Largely written, staged and directed by the street kids themselves, it exposes the dark underbelly of the failed economic miracle with a scabrous and deliberately shocking candour. It's hard to believe that directors as talented and daring
as these will take long to find new sources of finance. Tony Rayns