The 31st Busan International Film Festival launched its ten-day run with three career honors, a deliberately modest opening film, and a political controversy it chose not to discuss.
The Busan International Film Festival opened its 31st edition on Tuesday night at the Busan Cinema Center in Haeundae, the first time Asia’s largest film festival has raised its curtain as an A-list event recognized by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF). Under a clear, cool autumn sky, the red carpet began at 6 p.m.; the ceremony itself started at 7 p.m. and ran well past its scheduled 8 p.m. finish as three major honors were handed out in front of a sold-out outdoor theater. Organizers said tickets for the evening had gone in 94 seconds.
The festival runs through October 15 with 246 official selections from 59 countries, its largest slate since 2019.
Three honors, three generations of Asian cinema
The evening’s emotional center was Michelle Yeoh, back in Busan for the first time in 15 years to receive the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award. Her last red-carpet appearance here was in 2011 for The Lady; her relationship with the festival goes back to 2002, when she attended the Pusan Promotion Plan, the forerunner of today’s Asian Project Market.
Accepting the award, Yeoh described a festival that had grown from a showcase of Asian filmmaking into a genuinely global meeting point, one that gives Asian stories a platform far beyond the region. She closed by turning the credit toward the audience, telling the crowd that a film only becomes real when someone watches it: “You complete the film.”
Yeoh’s voice wavered when she paid tribute to Ann Hui, who received the Camellia Award earlier in the ceremony. The Chanel-backed prize honors filmmakers who have advanced the position of women in cinema, and few careers fit that description better. Hui, a defining figure of the Hong Kong New Wave and the director of Summer Snow (1995) and A Simple Life (2011), directed Yeoh in The Stunt Woman (1996). Yeoh praised Hui’s nearly five decades of filming the dignity of ordinary lives while opening doors for women behind the camera.
The third honor went home. Kim Dong-ho, BIFF’s founding festival director and former chairman, received the Korean Cinema Award for his role in carrying Korean film to international audiences. For a festival marking the start of what organizers call its next 30 years, honoring the man who built the first 30 was a fitting bookend.
Busan’s mayor, delivering his first opening-night address in the role, formally declared the festival open and invited international guests to catch “Busan sickness,” his term for the urge to keep coming back.
A small film, chosen on purpose
After the ceremony came the world premiere of Kim Jong-kwan’s The Table: Day and Night, an 80-minute anthology built from four conversations in a single Seoul cafe as summer turns to autumn. It is a loose companion to Kim’s 2016 film The Table, which played in Busan’s Korean Cinema Today section a decade ago.
The ensemble is led by Kim Minha, who also hosted the ceremony, alongside Joo Jong-hyuk, Han Sun-hwa, Chang Ryul, Shim Eun-kyung, Lee Hee-jun, Jeon So-young and Kim Dong-hwi.
The choice is a notable change of scale. Busan’s two previous openers, Netflix’s period epic Uprising (2024) and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (2025), each cost more than 20 billion won to make. The Table: Day and Night is an independent production. At the afternoon press conference, Korean cinema programmer Jung Ji-hye defended the pick, saying the film was small in budget but not in value, and that the festival wanted an opener a broad audience could simply sit back and enjoy in the outdoor theater.
Kim Jong-kwan described the film as a story made of small, trivial moments and the beauty inside them, asking audiences to look closely at a fragment of conversation and imagine where its people came from. Kim Minha said the film made her question whether people too often treat only big events as stories worth telling.
The guest list Busan wanted
If the opening film was quiet, the red carpet was not. Fan Bingbing, in Busan with Wayne Wang’s Diary of a Mad Old Man, drew one of the loudest receptions of the night. She was joined by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alfonso Cuarón, making his first visit to Korea, Hirokazu Koreeda, who brings Look Back, Koji Fukada with Nagi Notes, Na Hong-jin, Hyun Bin and Lee Jung-jae. Lee Chang-dong walked with the four leads of his new film Possible Love: Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong.
Yeoh arrived making the Korean “cheek heart” gesture for photographers; Fan answered with a finger heart from her seat when the cameras found her.
What A-list status changes
The glamour sits on top of a structural shift. Busan is now one of FIAPF’s 17 A-list festivals, and the winner of its Competition section can be submitted directly for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. That places Busan alongside Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance and Toronto as an Oscar-qualifying festival.
The competition, launched only last year, is judged by a jury led by Zhang Yimou, with Bi Gan among its members. Zhang framed the mandate in global terms: “Asian films should not remain confined to Asia.” He also noted that four of the jury’s seven members are women.
Festival director Jung Han-seok said the new competition forced Busan to ask what kind of films it actually considers good cinema, and that this year’s lineup was chosen to show the face of Asia today.
For the Chinese industry, the stakes are concrete. Gu Xiaogang’s The First Taste of Loneliness, starring Zhou Xun and closing his Landscape trilogy, is among the titles competing, alongside new work from Chen Jiwen. A Busan win would now open a direct path into the Oscar race.
The film that wasn’t there
One absence shadowed the night. Hur Jin-ho’s political thriller The Assassin(s), which revisits the 1974 shooting that killed First Lady Yuk Young-soo, had been scheduled for a public screening on the festival’s eve and a red-carpet appearance by its team. After the film became the target of conservative criticism in Korea following its September 23 release, a planned Q&A with star Lee Min-ho was cancelled, and the production company then announced that the director and cast would skip the festival, citing safety concerns.
When a reporter raised the issue at the opening-film press conference, programmer Jung Ji-hye took the question herself, asked that the session stay focused on the opening film, and referred journalists to the festival’s earlier written statement. For a festival whose credibility has long rested on its independence from political pressure, it is a story that will not disappear by Friday.
What’s next
Public programming starts in earnest today. Open Talk sessions at the Busan Cinema Center’s Roof Theater begin with Lee Chang-dong and the Possible Love cast, followed by Kim Ji-hyun’s Cattle Run with Ryu Seung-ryong. Master classes from Na Hong-jin, Lav Diaz, Bertrand Mandico and anime pioneer Rintaro follow from October 8, and the Asian Contents & Film Market runs October 10 to 13. The Busan Awards will be announced at the closing ceremony on October 15.
EntertainLens is covering the 31st Busan International Film Festival on the ground in Busan.
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