Award-winning films make their Korean debuts at Asia's premier film festival
The Busan International Film Festival kicked off Wednesday, running through Sept. 26 with its usual sprawl of screenings across the city.
As the festival enters its third decade, it continues to bring the most talked-about works in global cinema to Korean audiences for the first time. Here are the three essential picks -- tickets are available through the BIFF website.
What more can be said after Panahi's latest took home the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year? The work became the Iranian auteur's first to claim cinema's most prestigious prize, and marks his first work since being released from detention in Iran in 2023. In it, he has channeled that experience into something both deeply personal and politically relevant.
Built around what starts as a minor roadside incident, the film spirals into an examination of revenge and justice. Five former political prisoners believe they've identified the guard who tortured them during their imprisonment. As they were all blindfolded during interrogations, though, none can be certain. The resulting thriller unfolds with ratcheting suspense, punctuated by flashes of dark comedy and heated confrontations as the captives-turned-captors wrestle with their moral dilemma.
Panahi's connection with Busan runs deep -- he attended the festival's inaugural edition in 1996 and returns this year as an honored guest. The festival also offers an Asian Cinema retrospective of his works, including "This Is Not a Film," the 2011 documentary that was smuggled out of the country through a USB hidden inside a birthday cake.
"It Was Just an Accident" screens Saturday at 1 p.m. at Lotte Cinema Centum City.
"The Voice of Hind Rajab" was perhaps the true winner at Venice this year -- at least in terms of sheer emotional impact and the conversations it sparked. Ben Hania's devastating docudrama, which claimed the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, reconstructs the final hours of six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024.
The film builds its narrative around actual emergency call recordings from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, who stayed on the line with the trapped child as she pleaded for help from inside a car where her family members had been killed. Venice audiences sat through the agonizing reconstruction in stunned silence as the film transformed the hours-long phone call into an act of cinematic witness.
That it exists at all feels like an act of resistance.
"The Voice of Hind Rajab" screens Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Korean Community Media Foundation, and Sept. 25 at 4:30 p.m. at Lotte Cinema Centum City.
Locarno's Golden Leopard winner arrives as a quieter counterpoint to the political urgency of the other selections, though no less essential. Sho Miyake adapts two manga stories by Yoshiharu Tsuge into a meditation on loneliness and connection that unfolds in two distinct registers: summer by the sea, winter in the mountains.
The film follows Li, a Korean screenwriter living in Japan (played by Shim Eun-kyung), as she struggles with creative block. We watch her write a seaside romance between two young loners, then follow her own journey to a snow-covered village where she finds unexpected kinship with a grumpy innkeeper (Shinichi Tsutsumi).
Miyake shoots it all with remarkable formal control, his Academy-ratio frame capturing both the impressionistic rush of ocean waves and the muffled crunch of snow underfoot.
Korean audiences will appreciate seeing Shim Eun-kyung -- familiar from 2014's "Miss Granny" -- who's been building her career in Japan since 2019. She brings a lived-in naturalism to the role, navigating between languages and cultures with the same gentle grace that defines Miyake's filmmaking.
Screenings are Friday at 12:10 p.m. and Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at Busan Cinema Center, with an additional screening Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. at Lotte Cinema Centum City.