Berlin winner ‘On Body and Soul’ opens Jeonju Int'l Film Fest

Ildiko Enyedi, Hungarian director of this year’s Berlin International Film Festival Golden Bear winner “On Body and Soul,” came to Korea. The 62-year-old director’s movie opened the 18th Jeonju International Film Festival on Thursday.

“Though it is about love between a man and a woman, I did not want to show an idealistic happy life,” she told reporters in Jeonju. “The deer are in the dream, which were depicted beautifully. But they don’t have food, and they can be hunted. I wanted to show this to audiences.”

The film is about a bored man who learns that he happens to have the same dream as a woman who feels unfamiliar and is cautious falls in love with her. It mixes a dreamlike scene where a male and a female deer walk in an oak tree forest with a bloody slaughterhouse where the couple’s real workplace and a story of the couple who gradually falls in love each other.

Enyedi drew attention for “My 20th Century,” the golden camera winner of the 1989 Cannes Film Festival and one of the best 10 movies selected by the New York Times. A decade later, she released “Simon, the Magician (1999),” a fantasy movie, and another 18 years later, she unveiled a new movie. “You always have a good idea but funding is the challenge. The issue is money," she said. "I remade a drama in Hungary but it didn’t feel like my own.”

Though it is the Golden Bear winner, all actors and actresses in the movie are unfamiliar. “The actress is a stage actor and rarely appeared on movies,” Enyedi said. “The actor is a director of a Hungarian publisher who was not interested in acting at all.”

About the slaughter house in the background of the movie, she said, “The slaughter house is only a workplace for the people in the movie but it is a place to be killed for animals. But it doesn’t mean that everybody should be a vegetarian.”

Sun-Hee Jang sun10@donga.com