The 22nd edition of the JEONJU International Film Festival will be held from April 29 to May 8, under the slogan “Film Goes On.”

Last year, the 21st edition of the international film fest, which was initially scheduled to commence April 30, was pushed back once and then was forced to be held behind closed doors in May due to the spread of COVID-19. The organizer at the time held a hybrid event, going both online and offline, for 114 days.

This year’s festival will also be a hybrid event but the organizing committee has decided to hold the event for just 10 days.

“Although there are more confirmed patients compared to last year, the situation has changed and vaccination has also started. We think this year’s festival can be normalized,” JEONJU International Film Festival official Song Seung-jin told The Korea Herald. “Last year around 100 movies were screened online. This year, the decision on whether a movie will go online is up to each director.”

For the fest, 398 international films and 1,129 Korean films were submitted. This is slightly less than the number of films that were submitted for the 21st edition of the JEONJU International Film Festival. In 2019, a total of 1,506 films applied to be invited to the festival in Jeonju.

The film selections for this year‘s festival has yet to be announced.

Meanwhile, at the end of last month, the festival organizers changed the poster for this year’s event. The original poster, unveiled on Feb. 15, was taken down after the organizers became aware that the alphabet design in the poster was similar to one featured in Barcelona-based creative studio Hey Studio’s artwork “Rebuild Japan.”

“Even if it is not a case of plagiarism or imitation, we decided to change the poster as the spirit and motto of the JEONJU International Film Festival is ’originality‘.” JEONJU International Film Festival Organizing Committee said in a statement. “We express our regret for not filtering out the poster with a similar design in advance, and we will take this as our lesson and promise to present new and original film festival identity designs every year.”

By Song Seung-hyun (ssh@heraldcorp.com)