South Korea’s Puchon Festival Updates Spelling to Bucheon

The Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival has changed its official English name to Bucheon in accordance with South Korea’s official language romanization system, organizers said. 

The acronym of Asia’s largest genre film event will change to BiFan from PiFan.

Romanization or latinization is the conversion of writing from a different writing system, such as those used for Asian languages, to the Roman script.

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Bucheon, the host city that is near Seoul, has largely gone with the “B” as its first letter for the past decade, and the added e, but the festival was launched when a different romanization system was in place, which used the spelling “Puchon.” The change follows a similar change by the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), which officially renamed itself from Pusan in 2011.

Festival organizers say visitors will no longer be confused by the use of both Puchon and Bucheon to refer to the same Gyeonggi Province city.

“This change is to consolidate [the festival’s] position as one of the top genre film festivals in the world,” said a festival spokesperson.

The 19th edition of the film festival this year runs July 16-26.