Key Takeaways
The Ulsan Audience Media Center is partnering with the 11th Ulsan Ulju World Mountain Film Festival to run hands-on programs for visitors.
The lineup includes local documentary-making, a live dubbing theater, an AR-glasses screening space, and a soundscape experience.
The festival is moving beyond movie-watching and toward participation, creation, and place-based media experiences.
At this mountain film festival, the audience is no longer expected to simply sit and watch. Visitors can write scripts, dub scenes, and even watch films in the forest wearing AR glasses.
That is the point of the media programs introduced for the 11th Ulsan Ulju World Mountain Film Festival by the Ulsan Audience Media Center, a public media center run under South Korea’s Audience Media Foundation. The effort asks an important question: if a film festival is built around screenings, how far can it go in turning film into an experience?
Turning viewers into makers
The most interesting thing about the program names is what they reveal about the festival’s direction. “Ump Mentary” is a documentary production support project designed to uncover local stories from Ulsan and Ulju, two areas in southeastern Korea, while also helping train local film talent. This year, under the theme “Stories of Ulsan, Made by People from Ulsan,” citizens and local creators worked together to produce a short documentary of about 15 minutes, which is being shown during the festival.
“Live Dubbing Theater” pushes participation even further. Citizens adapt a short animated film, write a script, receive dubbing training, and then perform in front of an audience. The value here lies less in the finished performance than in the process. Participants are not just reading lines; they are learning how to turn mood, timing, and emotion into a live act. For a local festival to educate as well as entertain, this kind of format matters.
Forest screenings and soundscapes
Another part of the program uses the festival’s natural setting as a media space. The “Forest Theater” moves away from the fixed indoor screening room and lets visitors experience a personal screening environment in nature through augmented reality, or AR, glasses. The screen may be smaller, but the experience can feel larger, because the film is filtered through the sensations of mountains and trees as much as through the device itself.
The “Soundscape Experience” takes a different route by putting hearing before sight. At the Yeongnam Alps Complex Welcome Center, the festival venue in the mountains of Ulsan, participants collect and listen to sounds from the forest. The idea is not just to show scenery but to make audiences notice sound as part of the place. In that sense, the festival broadens film viewing from something you merely watch into something you physically move through.
A new competitive edge for regional festivals
This is more than a collection of one-off attractions. Film festivals today increasingly compete on how long they can keep people engaged, not just on how many films they screen. A festival becomes part of a city’s identity when people stay longer, return again, and have something to talk about afterward. By linking media experiences to the mountains and forests around Ulju, this festival is clearly moving in that direction.
Just as important, it does not separate local identity from technology. Local stories become documentaries, AR turns nature into a screening site, and sound is gathered to create a new kind of sensory experience. Technology is presented as a tool, not the star. When that balance works, a festival becomes not a flashy display of equipment but a place where a region re-edits its own sense of self.
But experience can easily overpower the film
That said, participation is not automatically a virtue. Hands-on programs can sometimes flatten the content if they are not carefully made. If the dubbing workshop ends up being only a lesson, or if the AR screening is remembered only as a gimmick, audiences may leave without much reason to return. Without a deeper connection to the works and the place, the event can quickly look like a consumable attraction.
That is why the real issue is not novelty but quality. Programs such as “Ump Mentary,” which preserves local narratives, “Live Dubbing Theater,” which gives participants a genuine creative process, and the soundscape project, which makes the site itself part of the experience, need to reinforce one another. If they do, the festival becomes more than a place that shows films. It becomes a stage where a region edits and performs its own story.
