A successful premiere for Inner Circle Line!

Hello friends and welcome to our filmmakers' blog! On February 1, we successfully premiered ICL to a sold-out crowd of about 250 people at the Pathe Cinema at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. When we got to the theater to do a technical check with the projectionist and I saw how large the theater was, I was a little worried about how the heck we were gonna get that many butts in the seats, but then we were told that the show had sold out earlier in the day! Moderator Ralph McKay did a little intro and Eunhee made a pithy speech before the screening and did a great job of answering questions in the Q & A afterwards. The IFFR staff were kind enough to bring us flowers at the end to celebrate our world premiere. Check out the cheesy photos - with the bouquet in hand, I felt like waving to the crowd like an ice pageant contestant or something ;) Many thanks also to our friends Kit and Mi-Sun for helping us out and taking photos!

In all, we had 1 press screening and 4 packed screenings open to the public. The Dutch audiences were great- very attentive, a little on the quiet side, but audible laughter and sniffles could be heard throughout the theaters, thankfully at the appropriate times! We had good Q&A sessions and lots of enthusiastic one-on-one questions afterwards too, and we were told by many that ICL was one of the best films they had seen at the festival, which was nice. Eunhee was also honored to have famed Korean director Chang-Dong Lee attend one of her screenings, as well as senior officials from the Pusan International Film Festival, and all offered nice compliments and camaraderie to her. She was pretty psyched to get such nice treatment from one of her idols!

Some other neat stuff - the Dutch magazine SAFE wrote an article about Korean films and ICL was prominently featured. At first, we couldn't read it, because it's in Dutch, and all we could tell was that Eunhee was mentioned in the same sentence as "Sofia Coppola" and "Lost in Translation". We figured it was probably good... and fortunately, we now have a full translation - check out our News and Reviews page on the website. Turns out they said, "Director Eunhee Cho's strong debut feature calls upon a sense of despair that strongly reminds us of Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION." Yay.

Next up for us is prep for our U.S. premiere at South By Southwest, where we're one of the 8 films picked to compete for the jury prize for Best Narrative Feature. We're looking forward to going to Austin, which we hear is a great indie-movie-lovin' party! Hope some of y'all can join us there! -Alan