2026 Busan International Film Festival Brings Feature Debuts from India, Philippines, and South Korea

This year’s Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) attracted more than 275,000 visitors across screenings of 315 films (94 of them world premieres) and special events. Guests included Alfonso Cuarón, Michelle Yeoh, Koreeda Hirokazu, Ann Hui, Fan Bingbing, and many more. 

Headed by Zhang Yimou, the competition jury awarded best film to Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal, a piercing Iranian drama about a teacher’s efforts to keep a school open. This was the first year BIFF was classified as an “A” list festival, making Midday Meal eligible for Academy Award shortlisting.

The legendary Chinese star Zhou Xun won a best actor award for The First Taste of Loneliness, which also won an Artistic Contribution prize. Sailesh Rathnakumar’s Selvi, which screened in BIFF’s Vision section, won two awards: Hylife Vision and Taipei Film Commission. The long tail of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light hangs over Selvi, a close-up account of a healthcare worker’s unraveling. Producer Anjali Patil stars in the title role as a hard-working health practitioner forced to undergo double and triple shifts to protect her suicidal sister.

Director Rathnakumar follows Selvi throughout a tough, unforgiving city as she takes overloaded buses, trains, and scooters to her appointments. Her clients require constant attention, shown in uncomfortable detail. (For example: here’s how you clean a tracheotomy tube.) Just as difficult are her bosses reaping profits from untenable work schedules. She lives in a hostel shared with other health workers, where there is no privacy and usually no running water. Selvi also has to send money home to a mother who constantly criticizes her.

Selvi

Selvi can be a tough slog, although Patil gives a determined and appealing performance. Rathnakumar doesn’t have much to say about the healthcare crisis other than the system being broken. It’s a worldwide problem that deserves attention, but a topic that needs a strong script. This story devolves into soap-opera melodrama involving unwanted pregnancies and cheating lovers.

On the opposite spectrum from Selvi‘s carefully traditional filmmaking style is Arvin Belarmino’s feature debut Ria, a defiantly provocative tour through a Filipino underworld of rappers, bikers, squatters, and scavengers. It opens with a blistering punk rock tirade against society—”Burn the state, crush the state, serve it on a plate”—delivered in a full-throttled roar by the title character, a bitter, sullen young woman played with uncommon skill by Nour Hooshmand. A Filipino–Iranian actor, Hooshmand also appears in Filipiñana. Ringed with kohl, her enormous eyes project equal parts hostility and despair.

Ria lives in a condemned tenement slated for development by a realtor who hires goons to disrupt the punk community. It’s an urban wasteland rendered more unlivable when water and electricity are shut down. Arson burns down the commune headquarters, almost killing a hungover musician. Ria cares for her adoptive mother Olga, who is slowly succumbing to diabetes. Ria works as a chambermaid in a luxury hotel, stealing liquor and toiletries and sneaking cold-water washes in sinks. Her paycheck goes to Olga’s insulin, but her friend still faces the amputation of her foot, an operation no one can afford.

One possible solution is to work in porn with her friend Kim in secret productions arranged through the hospital. Ria offers to be an assistant, but in a cringe-inducing scene her boss says he only wants performers. Her head in her hands, Ria later stares out a window at the city at night. It’s a moment heartbreaking in its simplicity.

Belarmino’s style is loud and in-your-face. In his debut feature, nothing is sacred, anything can be mocked, and life itself feels worthless. It’s an admirably hard-edged story that slips into sentimentality at the worst possible moments, only to be redeemed by frequent musical passages and Hooshmand’s expert performance.

Working with a tiny budget, the director stages some impressively large-scale street riots, punks firebombing police vans and showering riot cops with bodily fluids. Knowing they can’t win doesn’t stop them from trying, despite bullets and explosions. To Belarmino’s credit, he delivers an uncompromising ending. Ria had its world-premiere screening in the Vision section, where Belarmino appeared in person. He was engaging and outgoing, despite suffering a detached retina on his arrival that left him sporting a padded eyepatch.

Earbug

Another Vision world premiere had a similar DIY vibe. Earbug, Kim Hyomi’s feature-directing debut, is a deliberately low-res animation about twenty-something artists on the cusp of failure. Compared to Disney output, Earbug is a visual mess, its frames shimmering like a wavering Internet signal. Digital artifacts abound, hair doesn’t move, characters shuffle awkwardly when walking, sets are poorly designed and lit, and at times Hyomi just gives up and substitutes in actual film footage for drawing. 

Two aspiring artists live in a cramped apartment. Kim Jeong-yeon wants to be a writer, but is worried that she doesn’t have enough life experience. Kim Na-jeong, a painter, mocks Jeong-yeon’s attempts to write about love, laughing that she’s asexual.

The premise of Jeon-yeon’s novel is that an alien has come to Earth searching for true, absolute love. Judges at her school critique her writing mercilessly, one calling for a more active protagonist, the other saying it’s all too impersonal. Jeon-yeon doubts herself so much that she starts missing writing deadlines.

She works at the convenience store chain Nice to EU (a play on Korea’s ubiquitous Nice to CU stores), giving outdated food to a beggar who drops by nightly. That gets her fired, setting off more remorse. On top of that, her suicidal father keeps texting that he’s going to kill himself. Jeon-yeon is furious when Na-jeong has an affair with a married curator in order to get a solo show at a gallery. Na-jeong moves out, leaving Jeon-yeon nothing but empty walls and spiraling depression.

Hyomi, who also wrote and edited Earbug, takes her movie into decidedly offbeat territory when she describes Jeon-yeon’s sci-fi novel. The alien takes the form of an earwig in order to travel from host to host. Occasionally he will appear life-size to criticize his creator’s writing. Another narrative strand involves teen rockers who enrage a local minister after he finds them practicing in his church. At one point, a severed ear turns into a giant UFO that might be spreading a pneumonia virus that has shut down the city.

Although its story is scattered and animation primitive, Earbug captures the struggle young artists face as they fail repeatedly in their efforts. With nothing to encourage continuing, their perseverance becomes admirable. In a similar way, Hyomi has succeeded in completing a feature despite everything against her. Well, not everything: her film was supported in part by the Korean Academy of Film Arts. Like the two directors above, she is a talent still in development.