Busan After Dark

In the hours after the last CJ or Showbox party, awards presentation or karaoke session, you’ll find filmmakers, festival programmers, sales agents and buyers from all over the world sitting in the tent bars, staring at undulating sea creatures and enjoying a late-night soju or beer.

And if you have Korean friends or any kind of friends in the know, they will likely have made you try ‘live octopus’. It’s almost a rite of passage for Busan guests. If the first image that comes to mind is Choi Min-shik eating a whole and writhing octopus in Old Boy – no, never mind that. The raw octopus served here is smaller, cut into pieces, and not technically alive. It’s just still squirming, with tentacles helping it along – sometimes making for a circuitous escape off the plate.

If you get past any squeamishness you might have, the delicacy is actually quite tasty. You dip it in sesame oil with salt, or a red pepper sauce and vinegar mixture. I wouldn’t be stingy with the dipping because there have actually been live octopi-related deaths. It’s important to chew down properly and make sure you get that bugger to stop squirming before you swallow – just in case it goes down the wrong way and chokes you to death. But hey, people have choked to death on beefsteak, too. No need to be paranoid.

Now, force majeure is a good excuse not to try live octopus for the first time, but force majeure hasn’t struck thrice for Screen International’s chief film critic and reviews editor Mark Adams. His first trip to Busan was in 1998, when a typhoon hit the city and he was reportedly blocked by volunteers and staff from leaving the Paradise Hotel in Haeundae to watch films, so of course no raw octopus for Mark that time.

He returned to the festival 15 years later, and Busan got its first October typhoon in a record 15 years. So once again, no octopus for Mark. (The festival organisers, by the way, were watching carefully and I think they might very well have disinvited him hereafter if he had brought along another typhoon this year.)

Anyway, it had been weighing on my conscience that one of my favorite colleagues had not yet undergone this important rite of passage in Busan despite having been here more than once, and I’m glad to say we sorted that out on the weekend.

“It’s going around my teeth and the back of my tongue,” was Mark’s reaction to his first bite of octopus.

Asked if it was good, he simply nodded while lost in concentration, chewing down on that bugger.

I’m happy to report he got through the rite of passage admirably, had several more pieces, and is no longer a raw octopus virgin.