Amoeba (Siyou Tan, 2025).
“Be prepared—everything’s massive,” I was warned by a friend mere hours after arriving at the Busan International Film Festival. I found out later she was referring to the Busan Cinema Center, the principal venue of Asia’s most renowned film festival, but there was an open-endedness to her injunction that suited the event, its various venues, and the skyscraper-crowded metropolis itself.
Walk the few hundred meters from the Busan Cinema Center in Centum City to the other cinema hub, the CGV, on the seventh floor of the Shinsegae Department Store, and you’ll come across at least two Guinness World Records certifications, on plaques encased in glass. The first recognizes Shinsegae as the world’s largest department store; constructed in 2009, it covers an area of 293,905 square meters (3.16 million square feet). In addition to its many high-end outlets and the multiplex, the store features Zooraji, a dinosaur-themed rooftop park, and “Spa Land,” a vast network of saunas. Meanwhile, the Busan Cinema Center itself boasts five indoor screens and one outdoors, and holds the record for “the world’s longest cantilever roof” at 85 meters (278 feet, 10.45 inches). As a street-level pedestrian, it is astonishing to take the measure of these structures, towering like docked spaceships overhead.
As if inspired by these plaques’ epic pronouncements, the BIFF celebrated its 30th anniversary with an ambitious push to reach new heights, rolling out a new pan-Asian competition of fourteen titles, growing and reconfiguring all extant program sections, and swelling the number of international attendees at its already massive industry market; the number of screenings, in turn, ballooned from 278 last year to 328 this year, and public attendance increased by over 20,000. The festival was nearly felled by scandal in 2023, when a power struggle broke out among management that resulted in the ignominious resignations or dismissals of the two codirectors, the chairman, and the director of the market. Given this recent history, and the anemic state of the post-pandemic Korean film industry, the decision to expand was an uncommonly confident response to choppy cultural waters.
Leave the Cat Alone (Daisuke Shigaya, 2025).
Founded in 1996 by a group of film professors and critics standing in opposition to Seoul’s dominance of national culture, BIFF rapidly earned a reputation as a crucial hub for the Asian film industry. It was inaugurated in the moment of the emergent New Korean Cinema movement, which popularized an image of Korean filmmaking as edgy and uncensored. Thanks to globalized financial markets, general democratic optimism, and a political hunger for soft power, Asian festivals burst onto the scene in quick succession: Tokyo (1985), Singapore (1987), Yamagata (1989), Shanghai (1993), and then Busan, followed by Jeonju (2000). These new festivals provided a direct channel between filmmakers and programmers in a more analog era, facilitating the exchange of videotapes and business cards that resulted in new Asian films circulating at established European festivals. Simon Field’s direction of Rotterdam and Marco Müller’s of Locarno during these years were especially consequential for bringing the Asian film industry into the global spotlight.
Even as film culture has become more atomized, the sprawling BIFF has maintained its reputation as an international crossroads between the East and the West, as well as a celebration of international cinema more broadly (after all, the opening film in 1996 was Mike Leigh’s Palme d’Or winner Secrets & Lies). What has faded somewhat is its reputation for bohemian gatherings running late into the night in bars encircling the cinemas. For the first fifteen editions, most screenings would take place in the Nampo-dong market and theater district on the far side of town, near the docks, but the famous Haeundae Beach—another Guinness World Records holder, for the most beach umbrellas in one place, 7,939, in 2008—exerted an irresistible pull for the organization as a base for the festival guests. In 2011, construction finished on the Busan Cinema Center, located in the business and shopping district, and the festival permanently migrated there, with the film market occupying the giant BEXCO convention center nearby. This year’s opening night saw an impressive but odd parade walk the carpet, speaking to the festival’s full transformation into a glamorous stop on pan-Asian publicity tours. On the scene were über-trendy figures like K-Pop star Lisa, model Lee Soo-hyuk, and actress Jeon Jong-seo, comingling with the likes of Michael Mann, Ken Watanabe, Sylvia Chang, and Guillermo del Toro. Paul W. S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich were in town to accompany the Korean coproduction The Protector (all films 2025 unless otherwise noted), though unfortunately I couldn’t score a ticket—the capricious ticketing system was the bane of all accredited guests.
No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook, 2025).
As the festival rumbled to life, the struggles of the national industry and its unlikely alignment with a global craze for all content Korean were common points of discussion. Korean cinema attendance peaked in 2019 at 226 million; in 2024, after years of slow recovery, that number was 123 million, even as Korean television and cinema are beloved and in demand elsewhere. In 2019, South Korea had the highest per capita attendance rate in the world—the average resident watched more than four films a year in theaters; in 2024 that figure had been halved, and the number of commercial films produced in the country had fallen dramatically, from 60 to 37.
Park Chan-wook and the cast of No Other Choice, which opened this year’s BIFF, were promptly asked about this phenomenon at a press conference before the ceremony. Despite the lavish surroundings and celebratory atmosphere, the actors flanking Park on stage gave uniformly downbeat answers, without a hint of hopeful prognostication. “Now it seems like if you only do film work, you’ll starve to death. And that’s the reality,” said Park Hee-soon, who plays a divorced line manager in the film. “This is my screen comeback after seven years,” added Son Ye-jin, who plays the second lead. “I have anxiety about how much longer I can act in the future and how frequently I’ll be able to participate in films. I feel an even stronger desire for directors like Park Chan-wook to create more works; I want to do my best in my place so we can move in a better direction.” The cast, finally debuting the film on their home turf after its Venice and Toronto premieres, sounded uniformly thankful that Park had thrown them such a prestigious lifeline in a moment of peril.
Two Seasons, Two Strangers (Sho Miyake, 2025).
The BIFF seemed to be pulled in two directions: extravagantly toasting a remarkable milestone amid opulence, star power, and public enthusiasm while grappling with the hangover of a dramatic organizational reconfiguration and lackluster industry backdrop. As recently as 2022, public funding made up twenty percent of the festival’s budget, but this year that figure stood at a mere four percent, following years of jostling with the administration of then President Yoon Suk-yeol and with the Busan City Council, who clashed spectacularly with the programming team in 2014 over the selection of an unflattering documentary about the Sewol ferry disaster. In the past three years, the festival has pivoted to a patchwork of private funding to fill the gap. Amidst organizational difficulties, a conscious decision was made to expand and creatively reimagine the program. “There was organizational inertia after 30 years—I myself was part of it,” said director Jeong Han-seok before the festival in an interview with Marie Claire. “Simply embracing past glory is to settle for decline.”
The festival’s vast program included a new competition, featuring fourteen Asian titles, a mix of world premieres and festival favorites like Shu Qi’s Girl, Bi Gan’s Resurrection, and Sho Miyake’s Golden Leopard winner, Two Seasons, Two Strangers. The Vision slate contained 23 films, all world premieres from Asia. A Window on Asian Cinema held 25 Asian films, mostly selected from other festivals (though with some world premieres). Korean Cinema Today hosted ten films, most of which were premieres. This is not to mention other tribute sections, the midnight films, the gala presentations, the documentary sidebars, or the nineteen-film panorama of world cinema. Perhaps this gives a sense of the colossal, Shinsegae-like scale of Busan’s program. You can find everything and nothing, but most often, you’re overwhelmed by the abundance of choice.
Good News (Byun Sung-hyun, 2025).
Among the gala presentations, Byun Sung-hyun’s Netflix-distributed Good News—a broad, buoyant, unpredictable Korean blockbuster comedy about the Red Faction Army hijacking of Japan Air Lines Flight 351 in 1970—was a madcap good time, diligently avoiding the “based on true events” seriousness that has sunk nearly all Hollywood and European variants on this theme. Byun’s comedy is instead driven by a relentless satirical energy, vigorously lampooning anything and everything, never taking itself all that seriously. Despite the bluntly regressive quality of his politics—made for a South Korean audience, there are even more cheap swipes at naïve leftist revolutionaries than you might expect—Byun knows how to throw together an entertaining genre film as well as he knows how to turn one inside-out. The film moves fast, swinging aggressively at virtually all viewpoints along the way, and shrugging off any self-importance.
Leave the Cat Alone (Daisuke Shigaya, 2025).
From the competition, by contrast, Daisuke Shigaya’s Japanese Leave the Cat Alone is a slow-going but rewarding drama about thirtysomethings and their life crises. It holds up against the more eye-catching spectacle of Good News as an example of one kind of minor pleasure the BIFF program has to offer. Charting the slow disintegration of a marriage between a photographer and a musician, its pulse is measured, but Shigaya finds ways to subtly reshape how the story comes to us, bending time in on itself to compare well-off hipster artists and their ex-lovers with their earlier, perhaps happier selves who worked menial retail jobs and lived in shittier apartments. His willingness to playfully tweak the narrative around the edges, as well as his impeccable eye for casual staging in domestic spaces, is welcome even in this modest form.
After Dreaming (Christine Haroutounian, 2025).
Christine Haroutounian’s After Dreaming was similarly a perfect discovery for Busan: the Armenian-American coproduction opened the Berlinale Forum this February but has been slept on by major festivals in the months since. The director criss-crossed Armenia with a small crew to piece together out of fragmentary but evocative snatches of time this tale of a well-digger’s daughter and a soldier traveling through landscapes marked by wartime traces. A remarkable formal device lends the film its most memorable quality: After Dreaming’s images quite literally slip in and out of focus, transforming what we’re seeing in ways that are impossible to predict. The points of visual clarity are often confined to the outer edges of the frame, a mesmerizing, painterly effect. Time and space are warped; we see people shaken or displaced by the then ongoing war with Azerbaijan. Though Haroutounian has insisted that this is not a war film, the conflict lingers like an unpleasant illness in the body of the narrative.
After Dreaming, shown in the Window on Asian Cinema section, was a good example of what these self-consciously regional programs do best: reshuffle the deck of festival films from the year, giving underappreciated titles a new forum in which to shine. Never mind that Armenia and South Korea are part of a single region only in the broadest sense; the grouping shakes off the dust of received wisdom and breathes fresh life into the matrix of the year’s best films.
Amoeba (Siyou Tan, 2025).
Another title in Window on Asian Cinema, Siyou Tan’s Amoeba, is a remarkable Singaporean film fresh off its premiere in Toronto: a deliberate portrait of a group of girls at the elite Confucius Girls’ Secondary School in Singapore, rebelling against its strictures in ways big and small. Tan’s film navigates the careful construction of a queer identity in a suffocatingly conformist society, showing the formative experiences that shape that identity with a high level of specificity. By refracting this laid-back but lovely tale through alternate formats—like the handheld video shot by one of the protagonists—and by couching it in a wealth of historical detail without any winking overemphasis, Tan fiddles with genre expectations without lapsing into coming-of-age clichés.
Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou, 2025).
Like After Dreaming, Shih-Ching Tsou’s Cannes Critics Week selection Left-Handed Girl got a second life in Busan months after its festival debut. Confined primarily to a night market in Taipei, Left-Handed Girl depicts a family of three women—single mother, adult daughter, and young child—struggling from one day to the next to keep their noodle stand afloat. Tsou was Sean Baker’s codirector on Take Out (2004) and is his longtime producer; Baker takes on cowriting and editing responsibilities on Left-Handed Girl, an intriguing and unconventionally hands-on model for those times when a more established director helps a protégé transition into their first solo feature. Baker’s influence is obvious in the relentless pacing, but Tsou’s distinctive perspective is equally evident in the wealth of lived-in, almost throwaway detail drawn from working-class life in Taipei.
Films like this one, set for global distribution by Netflix and selected as Taiwan’s submission to the Oscars, sat in competition alongside smaller-scale world premieres, like the restrained but adventurously stylish Tajik drama Another Birth, directed by first-time filmmaker Isabelle Kalandar. Drawing from the poems of Forough Farrokhzad, Kalandar weaves a lyrical world around the lives of two protagonists: a mother, played by the director, and a young girl (Shukrona Navruzbekova), whose imaginative leaps determine the film’s trajectory, her childlike speculations and inventions seeming to literally shape the narrative alongside the poetry spoken on the soundtrack. Indeed, seeing this on the first proper day of festival screenings felt special: Kalandar has crafted the rare work that earns its slowness, full of inventive redesigns of the frame that keep it from feeling overly determined. It takes Farrokhzad’s poetry seriously, a departure from the realm of woozily “poetic” cinema that has little relation to the actual structure of poetic verse.
Kok Kok Kokoook (Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap, 2025).
Besides Good News and No Other Choice, Korean cinema did not yield many discoveries at Busan, though there were so many Korean films spread across so many sections, many of them by first-time filmmakers, that a second roll of the dice may have produced different results. The two world premieres that most impressed me were from India: Kok Kok Kokoook by the Assamese filmmaker Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap, his graduation film from the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), and If on a Winter’s Night by Sanju Surendran, a Keralese filmmaker with a few features already under his belt.
Kashyap’s film, shot entirely with a wide lens that distorts landscapes and interiors alike, is all joyful, eccentric invention. In this story of a Muslim chicken-seller forced into a life of destitution on the outskirts of Guwahati, every shot overflows with a gutsy creative energy that belies the cheapness of the production and the miserabilism of the story. It’s a film about immigrants, racism, exploitation, and poverty—one of the main characters is a Sudanese refugee working in a nearby massage parlor—enlivened by florid visuals and frequent surrealist digressions.
If on a Winter’s Night (Sanju Surendran, 2025).
If on a Winter’s Night plays something like a Frank Borzage movie for the 21st century. Set in sprawling New Delhi, the film shows how the love between two creative workers—a visual artist and an employee at a small film festival—is gradually worn down by the social forces set against human thriving. Like Borzage, Surendran films their love like he really believes in it, giving over an uncommon amount of screen time to lovers’ kisses, hugs, and intimate moments together without making their romance the narrative subject proper. Few contemporary dramas treat love as something that needs to be depicted realistically, built out of details worth depicting in their own right. This is melodrama without histrionics, but the very real love between Abhi (Roshan Abdul Rahoof) and Sarah (Bhanu Priyamvada) is nevertheless tested by the abounding outrages of the real world: a comically thoughtless landlord, lack of money at hand, stupid debts with an outsize significance, unforgiving relatives demanding money, or discrimination based on language (they speak Malayalam, not Hindi, and are threatened and pushed aside for it). Films about those laboring in the film industry have rarely shown how chronic bad pay saps the creative impulse, making If on a Winter’s Night an even more notable discovery.
Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000).
On the final day of the festival, worn down by spending so many hours in malls, I indulged in a retrospective title I expected to bring me to life: Shinji Aoyama’s messy, expansive masterpiece Eureka (2000). As Aoyama’s film ended, so did a closed world governed by its own emotional logic. More so than even most great films, Eureka constructs a giant narrative universe with its own laws and metaphysics; from the first shot in the parking lot, Aoyama signals that this three-and-a-half hour film is capable of swinging in any direction—that it will be one in which great disruptive energy will explode on screen without warning, but also that we’re going to be forced to spend time with these people as they muddle through the aftermath of a personal apocalypse, a public shooting that upends their lives. There is a profound sadness even to quiet domestic scenes that seem, in Aoyama’s hands, to stretch into infinity, a stasis sporadically punctured by eruptions of violence. When the credits rolled, I felt the weight of all I’d just seen pressing down on me.
A few seconds later, the lights went up and, without warning, the cinema was flooded with adoring fans eager to snap a picture of Bong Joon-ho, who took the stage to speak about his friend Aoyama. “I don’t know how much I can say,” Bong offered. “After a film like this, it’s probably best not to speak. Better to go sit in a bar and drink a beer.” Surrounded by a wall of smartphones and accidental camera flashes, I decided to take Bong’s advice and slip out into the night, hoofing it past the towering malls, the chain coffee shops, the multi-level escalators moving silently upward and downward without passengers, the red carpet, the selfie stands, and alongside the river, where it was again possible to puzzle it all out, to search for my own eureka in that comforting silence of the night.