Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s The Endless picked up the Best of Bucheon award at this year’s Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BiFan) in Korea.
The competition jury described the film, about two brothers returning to visit a cult that they had escaped years earlier, as “a perfect combination of science fiction ideas translated to the screen with a strange naturalism and sometimes scary minimalism.”
The Jury’s Choice award was presented to Spanish sci-fi horror Black Hollow Cage, directed by Sadrac Gonzalez-Perellon, while the NH Audience Award went to Taiwanese filmmaker Gidden Ko’s Mon Mon Mon Monsters. A special mention went to Hentaida (I Am A Pervert), directed by Japan’s Anzai Hajime.
In the Korean Fantastic Features section, best film was awarded to Shim Chanyang’s Behind The Dark Night, about a group of Christopher Nolan fans attempting to make their own movie.
Best actress in this section went to Park Ji-soo for The End Of April, directed by Kim Kwang-bok, and best actor went to Oh Ryoong for Chung Geunwoong’s The Gravity Of Acting. Im Heung-soon’s Ryeohaeng picked up the Audience Award.
BIFAN also holds a genre-focused projects market, Network of Asian Fantastic Films (NAFF), which presented its top award, the $13,000 Bucheon Award, to Taneli Mustonen’s The Twin. Introduced as one of the selections in NAFF’s Nordic Genre Invasion section, the project is a horror film about the trauma a parent faces after suddenly losing one of their twin sons.
The $9,000 NAFF Award went to horror mystery Eerie from the Philippines Mikhail Red, while the $10,000 Signal Pictures Award went to Chinese filmmaker Bu Wei’s Man Of Sin. Cash awards also went to Lee Seungwon’s The Legend, Kim Jaeyeon’s A Teacher and Kyoko Miyake’s Femme Fatale.