Asia's premier movie festival, the Busan Interna­tional Film Festival (BIFF), will be held at a newly purpose-built venue from this year. The Busan Cinema Center, which had its grand opening on Sept. 29, boasts the world's largest roof and also has an outdoor stage. With the combination of the stage and some cutting-edge LED lighting installed on the roof, BIFF has set the stage for a spectacular opening ceremony as befits a red-carpet event.

 The facilities are not the only amendment this year - the festival has also been renamed to bring it in line with the city's official Romanized spelling - but they are perhaps the most impressive. The center is divided into four areas: Cine Mountain, BIFF Hill, Double Cone and Lamp Bridge.Cine Mountain is a nine-story building that serves as the core of the structure. It features a multi-purpose theater housing 841 seats, another medium-sized theater with 413 seats, and two smaller theaters that can each accommodate 212 people. The first five floors are taken up by the audito­rium. The sixth floor houses the main lobby, floors seven and eight are furnished with movie theaters, and the ninth floor is reserved for office space. Visitors can purchase tickets to access the lobby then take an escalator or stairs to the movie theaters above. The lobby is large enough to accommodate hundreds of people, and members of the public will be able to use the center before and after the festival to watch movies. The multi-purpose theater on the first five floors c an host operas, musicals, plays and musical concerts in addi­tion to screening movies during BIFF, which opens on Oct. 6 and will show around 300 movies from some 70 countries during its nine-day run. Meanwhile, BIFF Hill will be used as the official office of the festival's organizing committee. A press center will be set up in a multi-purpose hall on the first floor through­out the festival's duration. The second floor is the home of Cinematheque Busan. Other parts of the building will be taken up by a refer­ence room filled with images and printouts of movies, a classroom for lectures on film theory, an editing classroom, and a special editing room for experts so that BIFF Hill can fulfill its role as both a movie library and training ground for aspiring filmmakers.

Double Cone is another key part of the Busan Cinema Center, but the focus here is on entertainment and relax­ation. As such, it is equipped with leisure and convenience facilities such as cafes and restaurants. Near the outdoor stage under the Small Roof is a 4,000-capacity outdoor auditorium that will show the opening and closing movies of the festival on a giant screen measur­ing 24 meters in width and 13 meters in height, making it the biggest of its kind in Korea. The structures of Big and Small roofs are designed to endure earthquakes measuring as high as 7.0 on the Richter scale, as well as winds gusting up to 65 meters per second and snowfall of up to one meter. When the 16th BIFF opens, the Busan Cinema Center will usher in a new era for the region's leading celebration of movie-making and show how Busan City, a proud hub of the Asian film industry, is constantly evolving.