This was perhaps the reason why the festival upped its ante this year with the launch of a full-fledged competition to mark its 30^th edition. No longer content with merely hosting its much-revered “New Currents” awards for upcoming filmmakers, Busan’s new festival director Jung Han-seok took the very bold step of opening up its top-tier contest to all filmmakers, regardless of their experience. Speaking to The Film Verdict before the festival, Jung said the decision was made so as to “encourage global filmmakers to be more interested in Asian cinema and motivated to visit Busan”.

Moving its dates this year to mid-September to avoid clashing with the National Sports Festival and the traditional mid-autumn festivities – a change which led to an increased proximity to Venice and Toronto, and a near-complete overlap with San Sebastián – the festival was left with more of a mountain to climb in its attempt to nail down world premieres for the line-up of its inaugural competition. The festival eventually arrived at a 14-title slate comprised of four films which have already bowed (or even won awards) elsewhere, plus ten others from directors of very diverse statures.

In the end, experience triumphed in the shape of top-prize winner Gloaming in Luomu, the 15^th feature of Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu. And deservingly so: rather than sticking to his long-running slow-and-subtle playbook, the 63-year-old burnished his trademark literary drama with sonic and visual experimentation. Zhang’s film could be seen as mirroring (and expanding on) an approach nurtured by his younger counterparts such as Bi Gan, who was also present in competition at Busan with his latest film, the Cannes prize-winner Resurrection.

Another industry veteran who emerged victorious in Busan is Shu Qi, who won the Best Director award with Girl. While the Taiwanese actor-turned-helmer had spoken frankly about being influenced by her mentor Hou Hsiao-hsien – with whom she worked on Millennium Mambo, Three Times and The Assassin – her first stab at directing was anything but derivative. While Shu peppered the first 15 minutes of her film with a wealth of visual references to Hou’s work, Girl soon morphed into a poised and heartfelt drama about a pre-teen’s attempt to break out of her the toxic environment at home by emulating the free-spirited nature of a new friend.

While the jury might still be out about the impact of the competition in enhancing the international edge of the festival, this new initiative has proved to be largely positive for domestic filmmakers. Beyond providing the opportunity for homegrown directors to compete for and win awards alongside festival big-hitters, the competition became more or less a showcase for the diversity of Korean films on offer.

Leading the way is Han Chang-lok’s Funky Freaky Freaks, which was bestowed with the Grand Jury Prize. Revolving around the manic misadventures of a trio of high-schoolers as they go to extreme lengths to distract themselves from their real-life problems, the film is a zany, barrier-breaking spectacle which tackled adolescent trauma in a drastically different way than Shu’s Girl.

Hard on Han’s heels is the Korean Academy of Film Arts graduate Yoo Jae-in, whose En Route To brought home both a Best New Currents award for herself and a Best Actor prize for Lee Ji-won. Veering away from its beginnings as a teenage-pregnancy drama, Yoo refuses to condemn her protagonists – the pregnant student (played by Sim Su-bin) and her goofy best friend (Lee) – to a simplistic, miserabilist existence. Rather, the duo’s resilience and solidarity shines through.

The other two Korean films in competition are present as if merely to illustrate the wide spectrum of domestic filmmakers at work today. A lavish, commercial romantic drama through and through, Lim Sun-ae’s 7 O’Clock Breakfast Meeting for the Heartbroken was perhaps placed in competition more because of the presence of its A-list star Bae Suzy than its content. The film certainly sits very much at odds with Lee Je-han’s By Another Name, a modest-budgeted and unfortunately uninspiring indie production about a dying filmmaker’s last wishes and his widow’s attempt to realise them.

Busan’s intention of highlighting the creativity and dynamism of the Korean film industry – and its thinly-veiled allusion to the festival’s central role in it – was there from the get-go. The opening ceremony started an hour late because of the endless throng of Korean filmmakers marching down the red carpet, all of them name-checked by an on-site host. Alongside international guests such as Jafar Panahi, Guillermo del Toro, Michael Mann, Milla Jovovich and Sylvia Chang, homegrown directors and stars were given an opportunity to take centre stage at the hallowed grand atrium of the Busan Film Center.

Canadian-Korean filmmaker Maggie Kang received a rapturous welcome with a masterclass and a sing-along screening of her Netflix megahit K-Pop Demon Hunters. Meanwhile, the retrospective of work by veteran social-conscious filmmaker Chung Ji-young was also very well-attended. The audience was made up of both pensioners revisiting their youthful memories and young cinephiles rediscovering films from (and about) a previous era.

According to the festival, the admission figures for screenings this year increased year-on-year by about 20,000 to nearly 176,000. Indeed, the enthusiasm at the Busan Cinema Center seemed very much undimmed during the festival’s ten-day run, with even the international press and visitors reporting inability to gain access to screenings. Events such as the “Actors’ House” meetings featuring A-listers Lee Byung-hun and Son Ye-jin were largely sold out, as were the masterclasses by Mann, Marco Bellocchio (who was given a full retrospective by the festival) and Juliette Binoche (in town for the Asian premiere of her directorial debut In-I Motion).

Just as importantly, the festival rebooted its dormant BIFF Forum. Running for four days at the Busan Film & Audiovisual Industry Center, one of the cluster of film-related buildings around the Cinema Center, the talk series comprised nine sessions about topics such as Asian co-productions, the ebbs and flows of Korean cinema during the past 30 years, film education in Korea and Asia, and – in its final session – the “mapping of the future of Korean cinema”. The title of the final talk was “Endangered K-Movie: We Will Find A Way. We Always Have” – a cri du coeur, perhaps, from the Busan International Film Festival itself, as it ventures into its fourth decade.

Of course, there are no animals actually jousting in the film—and although one agricultural item does suffer, another one is rescued from peril before long. In any case, the point of that proverb is one of the central themes of this Kazakhstan-set story involving a child, her mother, and her father. The latter two, formerly married, are the proverbial duelling elephants.

At first, the story focuses on Malika and her mother, a winsome pair living in harmony before tangentially related events upturn everything. In one of these events, a friend tells Malika that the nascent romance between her mother, Roza, and a seemingly pleasant man could be the beginning of an unwanted change in Malika’s life. If the romance transforms into a marriage, as these things sometimes do, Malika would have to go live with her father. This isn’t a possibility Malika intends to face.

In the scene in which this untoward information is passed, Malika tries to counter her friend’s ostensible pessimism by citing examples of parents who have gotten remarried without reconfiguring the lives of their kids. The tactic doesn’t work because, as she’s reminded, the customs of her family—they are Ingush—and those of Kazakhstan, the country they now inhabit, aren’t the same, even if Islam is, to some degree, a unifier. Apparently, Kazakhs are a lot more flexible in matters concerning divorce. The story doesn’t exactly tell us why kids have this much information on such adult concerns, but then precocity is baked into the tale.

The other event that triggers the story’s conflict involves Malika’s father, a not particularly agreeable man who shows up at his ex-wife’s home and, finding her absent, decides to wait for her return. Word has reached him about Roza’s new romance and he has appeared to tell her that he will take his child should Roza opt for marriage. It is the film’s first charged scene but as Roza is a mostly placid character, sparks do not really fly.

The theme of this lightly dramatic film emerges from those two scenes: the thorny nature of Ingush Islamic arrangements in the wake of a separation. Apparently, all of the decisions made on the subject of divorce and its debris are the purview of men. Which leads to a question that isn’t answered directly by Uvarova: Is Malika critical of those customs? It’ll appear so in theory but the answer is elusive. That is, unless the artistic presentation of the supposed the facts of a thing can be taken as criticism.

In other words, if it’s criticism, Malika isn’t cutting enough to provoke angry diatribes. At no point does the specific Ingush traditional norm—a remarried woman will lose custody of her child to its father—come into Uvarova’s screenplay’s crosshairs. It’s somewhere in the background. Even Malika’s father is portrayed as a brash but rather honourable man, who is merely doing what is right according to the dictates of his culture. Uvarova deserves praise for restraint because there is a version of this story in which his jealousy is overplayed into overwrought villainy.

But even as the film maintains a levelheadedness throughout, it does take away power from the mini-committee of men for the story’s final decision and nobody heads to court here. Which reminds us that Malika isn’t set in the U.S. and these adults are neither the litigious Americans from Kramer vs Kramer nor the complicated Iranians from A Separation. The move to put the female characters in control of their own fate does feel political on paper but onscreen it reads emotional, given that moving forward will mean Roza has to contend with the happiness of Malika and vice versa.

As the person shaping what gets seen by the audience, Uvarova (as both director and co-writer with Milana Misieva) doesn’t push the envelope in any direction philosophically, a tribute once again to her restraint, considering the many low-hanging ideological fruits her premise provides. Unfortunately, that restraint is one reason not many viewers will remember her debut feature in time. Hopefully, her subsequent work will provide even more reason for that to happen.

In the meantime, Malika can expect to have a decent run at festivals around Europe and Asia. It should also do quite well for families on TV thereafter. Aigul Nurbulatova’s colourful images are quite attractive and the film’s lead actresses (Izabella Khampieva and Marena Kharsieva) are delightful together, even when their characters are sparring.

Director: Natalia Uvarova
Cast: Izabella Khampieva, Marena Kharsieva
Executive Producer: Artem Vasilyev, Pavel Doreuli, Alexander Plotnikov, Ivan Golomovzyuk
Screenplay: Milana Misieva, Natalia Uvarova
Cinematography: Aigul Nurbulatova
Production Company: Lazy Sunday, Studio Metrafilms Moldova, Anykey, Dear Silence
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision)
Running time: 94 min.
Language: Kazakh

BEST FILM
Gloaming in Luomu
Directed by Zhang Lu (China)

BEST DIRECTOR
Shu Qi
for Girl (Taiwan)

SPECIAL JURY AWARD
Funky Freaky Freaks
Directed by Han Chang-lok (Korea)

BEST ACTOR
Lee Jiwon
for En Rout To (Korea)

Ex-aequo
Kitamura Takumi, Ayano Go, Hayashi Yuta
for Baka’s Identity (Japan)

ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTION AWARD
Liu Qiang and Tu Nan
for Production Design of Resurrection (China)

NEW CURRENTS AWARD
En Route To
Directed by Yoo Jaein (Korea)

BIFF MECENAT AWARD (KOREA)
Raining Dust
Directed by Ju Romi, Kim Taeil (Korea)

BIFF MECENAT AWARD (ASIA)
Singing Wings
Directed by Hemen Khaledi (Iran/Kurdistan)

BIFF MECENAT AWARD (SPECIAL MENTION)
Relay Race
Directed by Ko Hyoju (Korea)

SONJE AWARD (KOREA)
It Sounds Louder on Rainy Days
Directed by Kim Sang-yun (Korea)

SONJE AWARD (ASIA)
Delay
Directed by Wang Han-xuan (China)

SONJE AWARD (SPECIAL MENTION)
Interface
Directed by Kawazoe Aya (Japan)

Acclaimed for her hard-hitting social drama An Old Lady (2019, about a raped pensioner’s pursuit for justice) and then the fin-de-siècle comedy Ms Apocalypse (2023, which premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal in 2023), the academy-trained Lim has pivoted to yet another genre with Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club for the Brokenhearted. Bowing in competition in Busan, the film is sufficiently suave and mild-mannered to serve as proof of the cineaste’s ability to helm a pleasant, commercial vehicle anchored by squeaky clean superstars.

Compared to her previous work, however, Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club is akin to a meal comprising cold but Instagram-friendly tartines and ersatz coffee served in minimalist mugs. Featuring Bae Suzy as a young woman at once mourning a recent break-up and also coming to terms with her childhood trauma of being abandoned by her adulterous father, Lim’s film is a parade of pretty people and chic commodities in lush landscapes, delivered through Lee Jin-geun’s pristine camerawork and a surprisingly unintrusive score from Korean hip-hop musician Primary. What’s lacking is a spark that could awaken the characters from their lovelorn lethargy.

Bae plays Sa-gang, a flight attendant trying to recover from an affair with a married pilot (Yoo Ji-tae from Oldboy). Driven to distraction by her lover’s omnipresence at work and also the endless copies of Bonjour Tristesse popping into her mailbox – Sagan, the French writer, was what the pair talked about during their first meeting – Sa-gang signed up for a mysterious event in which people are invited to meet over breakfast and part with a memento from their past relationship.

So we see Sa-gang finding her way to the minimally designed venue before dawn, disposing of her much-detested (and largely unread) Sagan novels at the reception, and sitting down alongside perhaps maybe a dozen other people around a large round table for some haute cuisine. Overwhelmed by her emotions, Sa-gang stands up and leaves, picking up another “heartbreak souvenir” – a miniature Rollei camera – by random on her way out.

As she ponders over the photographs she obtains by developing the roll of unfinished film in the camera, the narrative leaps backwards in time and shifts to the perspective of its owner Ji-hun (Lee Jin-wook). A sprightly human resources consultant who peppers his motivational speeches with references to Russian literature and the like, the man is actually weighed down by the end of a stale long-term relationship with a girlfriend (Keum Sae-rok) and his duty of care towards his autistic elder brother.

Egged on by a well-meaning colleague, Ji-hun ends up joining that early-morning breakfast but leaves in a huff after finding his ex-girlfriend sitting and eating just a few seats from him. It’s hardly a surprise that he would grab the Bonjour Tristesse books as he exits – the start, no less, of the two protagonists’ frantic search for each other, and the development of a pure and dreamlike friendship built on an accidental night out (over nothing stronger than udon and sake) across the streets of Tokyo.

While the food and the postcard settings might indeed be salivating, the relationship between the characters are much less so. Driven by timeworn tropes of tragic characters weighed down by their parents’ marital problems or their loved ones’ illnesses, Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club never really breaks out of the refined mannerisms which might appeal to a certain young and middle-class demographic. Hemmed in by the stifling narrative, Bae and Lee cut a spectral presence throughout and standing in stark contrast to the more intense interactions they had in the Netflix TV series Doona!

Director: Lim Sun-ae
Screenwriter: Jung Yi-an, Lim Sun-ae, based on the novel by Baek Young-ok
Cast: Bae Suzy, Lee Jin-wook, Yoo Ji-tae, Keum Sae-rok
Director of photography: Lee Jin-geun
Editor: Park Se-young
Production designer: Kim Hee-jin
Music composer: Primary
Sound designer: Lee Seong-jun
Production companies: W/A Studio, WUSIWYG Studios, SOOP Entertainment
World sales: KT Studiogenie
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Korean
108 minutes

Revolving around a much-despised poultry vendor’s descent into neurosis and a grotesque metamorphosis, the director has delivered what could easily be the most singular and scintillating title at the Busan International Film Festival this year. That is quite an achievement in itself, given the modestly budgeted film’s humble beginnings as the young cineaste’s dissertation film at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute.

Running to just over an hour, Kok Kok Kokoook is proof of Kashyap’s potential as a concise storyteller and precise editor of his own wildly imaginative ideas – not to mention his ability to conjure raw visual splendour with the very minimal resources at his disposal. It’s a short, sharp shock to the system, and Busan might have missed a beat by not including it in the lineup of its inaugural top-ranked competition.

Like Kamal Swaroop’s similarly gibberish-titled 1988 cult film Om-Dar-B-Dar, the manic Kok Kok Kokoook pecks at social norms and stylistic conventions in more ways than one. Unlike Swaroop, whose film was left largely forgotten for nearly two decades before its renaissance, Kashyap shouldn’t have to wait that long before his career takes off.

In an astonishingly uninhibited and unhinged performance, Raju Roy plays Siken, a man who earns a living by selling chicken on a dusty, dirty junction in a small, chaotic down in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. Living alone in a rackety hut on a hilltop, the non-local Siken is bullied and reviled by nearly everyone: his name is actually a bastardised take on the word “chicken”, with some of the townsfolk simply calling him “Muslim” or “migrant”. The only person who wouldn’t call him any of that is Abebe (Esther Jama Paulino Kenyi), a Sudanese woman who somehow finds herself stranded in northeastern India after a botched flight for better lands.

Filmed mostly by DP Shingkhanu Marma in close-up with wide-angled lens, Siken appears perennially fraught with anxiety and fear, something neither his pet chicken nor the loving Abebe couldn’t really alleviate. His only solace lies in his red motorcycle, which he cleans – with soap, and in the river – with extreme affection and sensuality. However, he also has to rent it out to earn some extra cash – and it’s here that his problems begin, when a trio of bumbling, crooked cops arrive at the neighborhood to search for a biker (or the bike) involved in a deadly hit-and-run.

Fenced in by the manhunt and growing increasingly despondent of having to lose his beloved bike, Siken’s inner torment is turned outwards in a striking physical transformation made very, very real through the production design of Jyoti Sankar Bhattacharya and Harendranath Kalita, and also Reeya Phukan’s visceral couture. Arnab Borah’s jolting sound design resembles a slow-moving crescendo of white noise, dialling the horror slowly and gradually throughout the film until it reaches its stunning, literally jangling denouement.

Beyond all the doom and gloom, however, Kok Kok Kokoook is essentially a story about an individual’s pain-stricken journey towards spiritual transcendence. Bookended by an animated opening sequence about the kinship of dinosaurs and chickens and a poetic final shot that brims with optimism, the film is much more thoughtful and philosophical than its absurd moments might suggest. Kok Kok Kokoook crows loudly, but its message remains true – even if it’s packaged in the most outlandish way possible.

Director, screenwriter: Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap
Producer: S M Nazmul Haque
Cast: Raju Roy, Esther Jama Paulino Kenyi, Rupjyoti Das
Cinematography: Shingkhanu Marma
Editing: Sadang Arangham
Production design: Jyoti Sankar Bhattacharya, Harendranath Kalita
Costumes: Reeya Phukan
Music: Bhaskar
Sound: Arnab Borah
Production companies: Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Assamese, Hindi, English
62 minutes

They mourn the passing of loved ones, the lives of their own lost in the tragedy, the people they might – or should – have been. The milieu is a morose one, in which characters not only rarely smile but some reprimand themselves at the thought of happiness touching their glum expressions. However, Shin Sun’s film manages to mine desolation for some interesting observations and moments of drama and tension that make this far from an exercise in misery porn. Instead, the film is a thoughtful and thought-provoking rumination on loss and guilt which premiered this week at the Busan International Film Festival.

Those three central characters mentioned above are Heui-mi (Oui Ji-won), Young-mun (Ko Kyung-pyo) and Park Sang-ki (Ryu Kyung-soo). They are brought together as three players in an almost noirish plotline involving a private investigator, but one that eschews the atmosphere of the hard-boiled detective genre and jet-black morality for something altogether more sedate and nuanced. Heui-mi is an investigator whose days are primarily filled with following philandering men to provide evidence to their suspicious wives, and she is fed up with it. Her ennui is exacerbated by the news that her estranged father has passed away and she goes to visit his tiny nondescript rooms. Fully planning to hand in her notice, she goes into work only to meet Young-mun, who has a strange job for them. He’d like them to trail Sang-ki, the man who killed his wife in a car accident, just to see how he is doing. Young-mun is, evidently, not doing so well.

Despite the title, it is not the investigation element of Maze that becomes labyrinthine. Instead, it is the navigation of these three people’s own personal crises – each of them trapped in their own gloomy stasis – that becomes the film’s driving force. Heui-mi’s report back to Young-mun is completed by the midpoint, and the film less about mystery and revelation as it is about coming to terms with what has happened. That’s not to say that it is devoid of plot hooks and the disappeared dashcam footage from the accident, potentially redacted by Sang-ki’s internet-famous sister, provides something approaching a McGuffin, but it is not the narrative hairpin that it might seem, more of an emotional one.

If all of this sounds rather sombre, that is because it is. Maze is a film that wallows in the quietude of its three characters’ dislocation. Young-mun, Heui-mi and Sang-ki all walk around in something approaching a daze, finding it difficult to connect with colleagues, family members, potential romantic partners. Shin allows the time and space to for this to not just be described, but observed, and in doing so gives each of the performers the space to offer the slight chinks in doldrum armour they all wear so securely. These small moments allow the audience to glimpse the person below the pain and, as more is learned about all three, perhaps come to understand the different types of pain that they are in. In some moments that is regret and in others self-loathing, in some moments it is paralysis and in others spitting anger, in some moments disarray and in others clear-eyed intent. Each person goes on their own journey that revolves around the accident and death of Young-mun’s wife but correlates differently to the particular personal image that has been dashed in their grief.

Much like the narrative, Shin Sun and collaborators don’t opt for flashy visuals or dynamic editing. Ji Sang-bin’s cinematography is elegant but inconspicuous and the colour palette seems purposely designed to mimic the gloomy aspects of the characters. Aside from a few monochrome flashbacks to the day of the accident, Maze unfolds in a simple linear fashion. Its interpersonal observations might similarly seem modest at first, but by the time it ends, it has delved into a complicated emotional web that provides much to ponder.

Director, screenplay: Shin Sun
Cast: Ko Kyungpyo, Oui Jiwon, Ryu Kyungsoo, Kim Seungyun
Producers: Kang Taeu, Song Inkuk
Cinematography: Ji Sangbin
Editing: Lee Hoseung
Music: Lim Minju
Sound: Kim Juhyun
Production design: Moon Jieun
Production companies: Filmer Co., Ltd. (Korea)
Venue: Busan Film Festival (Vision – Korea)
In Korean
86 minutes

During his introduction to the film, which bowed in competition at the Busan International Film Festival, Zhang said Gloaming in Luomu was a modest entrée to a more sizeable, yet-to-be-finished collaboration with his lead actor, the Chinese rom-com queen Bai Baihe. But this film looks anything but a hastily concocted spin-off.

Revolving mostly around a woman’s wanderings in a town frequented mostly by hikers preparing to scale nearby Mount Emei, Gloaming is subtle in its emotions but ambitious in its stylistic experimentation – not to mention the understated allusions to identity and history, two issues Zhang has long been preoccupied with. Mirroring the Chinese magical realism which has captivated festival programmers in recent years, the film should chalk up good mileage on the circuit after its bow in Busan.

The roamer in Gloaming is Bai (Bai Baihe), an academy-trained dancer who arrives in the titular town with a postcard bearing a cryptic message from her missing lover (“An evening in Luomu”, a line that also serves as the film’s more mundane and less effective Chinese title). Recovering from a massive sunstroke, Bai is nurtured back to health and her senses by Liu (Liu Dan), the jaded, hard-drinking woman who owns a local guesthouse.

While the two women’s initial chats revolve around the disappeared man – Bai is shocked to learn that her ex, a poet, stayed in Liu’s inn for three years – the tête-à-tête eventually expands outward to a wild variety of topics. Rootlessness, for example. Bai talks about leaving her home in Qingdao to study and find work in the bustling capital; Liu laments losing her northeastern accent – and a part of herself – after spending years intoning standard Mandarin on state radio in Beijing. “It’s hard on you when someone can’t guess where you’re from,” she says.

In another heart-rendering scene, Liu Dan delivers an evocative reflection on human existence reciting from The Wild Grass by Chinese novelist Lu Xun. It represents a tribute, no doubt, to the scathing power of those words and the progressive social movement he co-founded a century ago. It’s just one of many examples of Lu’s wonderfully complex text. Profound without being pretentious, the dialogue is peppered with references to art and philosophy, the lines given substantial weight by the cast’s sound delivery.

Rather than playing up Luomu’s kitschy, touristy sheen, Piao Songri’s cinematography transforms the town into a disorienting maze of enigmatic spaces. Beyond the neat alleyways radiating pleasant provincial charm, ruined buildings loom large with ghostly presences within them. Liu’s guesthouse, which appears to be a calm refuge at the start of the film, gradually turns sombre as its proprietor tells her new friend about her past trauma. All these are spliced together, with jump cuts aplenty, by editor Liu Xinzhu, with Wang Ran adding a further sense of strangeness in a spectral soundtrack of strange white noise and short, sharp blasts of sweeping classical music.

 Director, screenwriter: Zhang Lu
Producer: Peng Jin
Cast: Bai Haihe, Liu Dan, Huang Jianxin
Cinematography: Piao Songri
Editing: Liu Xinzhu
Production design: Zheng Yican
Costume design: Chen Fei
Sound: Wang Ran
Production company: Chengdu Lu Films
World sales: Beijing Monar Films
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin
99 minutes

Taking his trademark lush lensing to new heights by setting his story in a dystopian future and teasing a stirring leading performance from Indian actor Indira Tiwari as a bio-scientist seeking more spiritual means to overcome a bereavement, Jayasundara’s French-Sri Lankan-Indian co-production should grab more stops on the circuit after its premiere in the Busan International Film Festival’s main competition.

Set in a world ravaged by what is known as the “illvibe” – a virus vaguely described as the product of out-of-control machines meddling with the human consciousness – Spying Stars revolves around Anadi (Tiwari), whom we first encounter as she lands on a largely rural island to disperse her deceased father’s ashes. Playing on his audience’s inevitable memories of Covid and its discontents, Jayasundara shaped Anadi’s arrival as a bureaucratic nightmare straight out of those apocalyptic times. Forced to go through repeated medical exams in a spankingly new, unnervingly empty airport, she is told she might be infected and is swiftly spirited to a quarantine center.

Rather than a drab decommissioned military barrack, the facility turns out to resemble something like a mountaintop resort, where newly-arrived guests are provided with welcome drinks, served exquisite meals by a tastefully attired staff, and given space-age lodgings with pristine bedding and wide, openable windows. Not that Anadi is wowed by all this, though. Stewing in her room and over her food, she seems unable to jolt herself out of her grief, apart from the sporadic moments when she succumbs to a virus-inducing seizure which brings back memories of her role in this techno-pandemic and her father’s death.

Unfortunately, this is never followed up or thoroughly explained in the film. Sticking to its preference for atmosphere rather than story, Spying Stars zeroes in on Anadi’s alienation and also the effect of the natural environment on her well-being. Fortunately, Anadi’s lethargy – and possibly that of the audience – soon dissolves as she flees the refined confinement of the quarantine center, and seek solace in a forest with the shamanic mother (Kaushalya Fernando) of a sympathetic quarantine center employee (Hidaayath Hazeer).

Contrasting the luxurious-looking yet gloomy interiors in the first half of the film, Jayasundara opens up Anadi’s world – and thus her much suppressed feelings – as she is given the liberty to roam the land. Her initial despair about the artifice at the resort is marked by her dismay in discovering a public address system that broadcasts animal sounds in place of long-extinct fauna on Earth, but gradually gives way to a rekindled sense of awe and wonder. Reconnecting with the lay of the land and literally levitating as she attains a new frame of mind, Anadi concludes her journey to inner peace in an encounter with a scientist (Saumya Liyanage) and his contraption that could reconcile grief-stricken individuals and help them bid a proper farewell to their departed loved ones.

Renowned for his work on more gaudily-hued mainstream TV (such as the Netflix series Dabba Cartel), DP Eeshit Narain proves his versatility by matching Jayasundara’s melancholia with a visual palette drenched in inky greens. Roman Dymny’s sound design also plays a significant role in evoking nature at both its most ominous and glorious: there’s hardly a need to spy the stars when Planet Earth look so intriguing and engaging.

Director, screenwriter: Vimukthi Jayasundara
Producers: Nila Madhab Panda, Vincent Wang
Executive producers: Nayomi Apsara, Anuj Tyagi
Cast: Indira Tiwari, Hidaayath Hazeer, Kaushalya Fernando
Director of photography: Eeshit Narain
Editor: Saman Alvitigala
Production designer: Nuwan Sanurankha
Costume designer: Ama Wijesekara
Music composer: Alokananda Dasgupta
Sound designer: Roman Dymny
Production companies: House on Fire, Eleeanora Images
World sales: Diversion
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In English and Sinhala
99 minutes

With its underwritten narrative, bifurcated structure, plain aesthetics, a filmmaking protagonist and emphasis on men behaving badly, indie cineaste Lee Jea-han’s third feature is a derivative, unengaging addition to Busan’s main competition. Compared to his first two features – the fish-out-of-water dramedy Sophie’s World (2021) and last year’s The Faces of Hwanhee, a portmanteau of four stories set in a close-knit community – By Another Name seems much smaller in budget and much more lightweight in scope. As it stands, it looks like a rushed job, a film devoid of the nuances of human interaction that made Lee’s first films so delightfully cute.

The first half of the film revolves around Jea-hyun (Moon In-hwan), a young but terminally ill director who wants to “make something real” before his impending demise. What that last masterpiece really is, we will never know; Lee only shows Jea-hyun wheedling his past associates, such as his kind-hearted producer Ji-young (Hwang Mi-young), to help him on this mad (or maddening) exercise.

Seemingly in robust health and alternating between self-aggrandisement and self-pity, Jea-hyun is a thinly sketched character, with Lee painting him and his motives in the broadest and most bombastic of brushstrokes. And the confusion continues after his death: bearing an on-screen title of “(Yet) Another Name”, the second chapter of the film sees Jea-hyun’s widow Su-jin (Hoelyn Jung) becoming obsessed with the project, her desperation leading her to ignore Ji-young’s warning and work with “a jerk” of an actor who looks and dresses the exact same way as her dead husband.

To speculate on what all this means is much ado about nothing. The only takeaway from Lee’s film, perhaps, is that cinema is something which can keep the sick from thinking about their sickness, and the bereaved from falling apart from grief. Well, at least that’s what happening on screen: off it, however, the bemused audience may think otherwise and call a minimalist film like this by another name.

Director, screenwriter: Lee Jea-han
Producer: Kim Su-min
Cast: Moon In-hwan, Hoelyn Jung, Hwang Mi-young
Cinematography: Kim Su-min
Editing: Mareummo Film
Music: Choi Yumsoon
Production companies: Mareummo Film
Venue: Busan Interational Film Festival (Competition)
In Korean
95 minutes

Bolstered by a sturdy screenplay and a fiery performance from the optometrist-turned-actor Gaumaya Gurung in the leading role, Shape of Momo steers clear of simplistic cultural exotica. It shows the viewer a community at once fascinated by the fruits of modernity (ranging from well-stocked supermarkets to iPad-obsessed grandmothers) but also steeped in certain social mores coming from the distant past. These include the unspoken expectations about how women live or should live, and the proud land-owners’ prejudiced views about their struggling tenants.

Reaching well beyond its distinct local sensibilities with universal themes, Shape of Momo – which won multiple awards in project markets across Asia before securing financial backing from Korea – should secure healthy returns on the festival circuit after its premiere in the New Directors’ competitions in Busan and then San Sebastian.

The title refers to a scene early in the film, with its protagonists seated around the table making Nepalese dumplings, momo. Having just returned to her village in Sikkim after spending years away studying and working in Delhi, Bishnu (Gurung) dismisses the art of making perfectly filled and formed momo as a waste of time: it’s fine as long as it’s edible, she says.

While this remark evidences her disdain towards traditional expectations for women, her brutal disregard of etiquette also shows how brusque she can be towards those around her. She chides her soft-spoken mother (Pashupati Rai) for her provincial ways, and is insensitive to the immense pressure felt by her pregnant sister (Shyama Shree Sherpa). She’s even more blunt with the lower caste people who cross her, as she shouts at her family’s servants and tenant farmers.

Bishnu’s rough edges are slightly softened by her meeting with Gyan (Rahul Mukhia), a sweet, gentle architect (and local political scion) helping her build a homestay in the village. Her conscience is finally awakened by a peasant family tilling her family’s land, as she witnesses the ostracism and violent removal of Nepalese migrant workers. Subtly but sure-handedly, Rai alludes to the schisms tearing at the paradise-like veneer of her Himalayan setting. Sikkim may boast the highest GDP per capita of all the Indian states, but there’s also a yawning gap between the standards of living of affluent land-owners and their impoverished labourers.

Cinematographer Archana Ghangrekar manages to strike a delicate balance, showing Bishnu’s (and Rai’s) hometown as other-worldly at certain times and ominous at others, while production designer Uttam Mondal merits attention for conjuring the diverse, high-altitude houses and rural terrain with a mix of rugged realism and colourful artifice. But Shape of Momo is ultimately defined by the screenplay Rai co-wrote with her producer Kislay, as the pair tease out the complexity of the characters themselves and the social norms they abide by, however reluctantly and unconsciously.

Director: Tribeny Rai
Screenwriters: Tribeny Rai, Kislay
Producer: Geeta Rai, Kislay
Executive producers: Mike Goodridge, Xu Jianshang
Cast: Gaumaya Gurung, Pashupati Rai, Shyama Shree Sherpa, Rahul Mukhia, Janaki Kadayat
Cinematography: Archana Ghangrekar
Editing: Anil Kumar, Kislay Kislay
Music: Mikhail Marak
Production design: Uttam Mondal
Costume design: Janaki Kadayat
Sound design: Ankita Purkayastha
Production companies: Dalley Khorsani Productions, Kathklaka Films, Aizoa Pictures
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Nepali, Hindi and English
114 minutes

The Iranian film director at the center of Without Permission says he’s suffering from a “terrible misfortune”. But he isn’t about to be slapped with a 20-year filmmaking ban, have his passport confiscated, or thrown into jail. No: his application for a shoot was rejected by the state censors, leaving him with the oh-so-demeaning prospect of making a clandestine movie with children in a basement. “I wish somebody would make a film about me,” the man laments, crying to the gods from his car. “A filmmaker who has to shoot his film secretly in a cellar!”

Is this line written out of jest, perhaps a reference to the hard-boiled, self-absorbed filmmakers which prop up films such as Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us? Or is this an earnest riposte against the Iranian authorities’ long-running campaign in silencing dissenting artists, which has led to the multiple convictions and imprisonment of cineastes such as Jafar Panahi and Mohammed Rassoulof?

Either way, Without Permission is problematic: the former, more cynical scenario will render Nazer’s whole premise about a cineaste’s resistance to censorship moot. If the latter is true, then the film was perhaps made a few years too late, with a new generation of Iranian filmmakers (and Iranians in general) already evolved towards other means of resistance. It bears a definite resemblance, at least thematically, to Ali Asgari’s deadpan tale of a frustrated and thwarted filmmaker in Divine Comedy, which recently screened in Venice’s Horizons.

A hybrid of fiction and documentary, Without Permission revolves around the attempt for a fictional, exiled Iranian director (played by real-life Iranian filmmaker Behrouz Sebt Rasoul) and his assistant (Setareh Fakhaari) to circumvent censors and produce a literally underground film somewhere far from the city. Proclaiming he wants to “hear from youth”, the director drives around the countryside to recruit local children for the shoot, asking elementary-age kids about what they love to do, wear and play.

Taking a leaf from a similar experiment in Kiarostami’s 1989 documentary Homework (with children talking about school), Nazer reveals the different values of kids from different social, economic and cultural backgrounds. But the one thing the director (or Nazer himself) wants to know is the children’s attitude towards love of the romantic kind. This, he believes, will reveal the impact of stringent religious dogma on the way these boys and girls regard and treat each other. But the exercise becomes increasingly questionable as the children are asked to improvise lines about love with a participant of the other sex.

The director (both the one on and off screen) might congratulate himself for having provoked his charges to think freely, but one struggles to see the point of casting them as dating lovebirds in staged scenes – apart from being a mischievous schtick designed to rile those ultra-conservative clerics with their interdicts against the public display of any form of intimacy in Iran.

Perhaps to press home the objective of his experiment, Nazer leavens the main narrative with sporadic fictional scenes of marital disharmony between a warring couple and their combative exchanges with unsympathetic (and unseen) judges during the woman’s application for a separation. However, these episodes are basically overwhelmed by Nazer’s main premise – which is about a director saying, “I have a question and I needed to satisfy my curiosity.” It takes much more than this to make a film fair for its participants, enlightening for its audience and maddening for the tyrants reigning supreme with their repressive regimes.

Director, screenwriter, producer: Hassan Nazer
Cast: Behrouz Sebt Rasoul, Setareh Fakhaari
World sales: DreamLab Films
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Persian
80 minutes

Pulling no punches whatsoever in depicting his protagonists’ dashed hopes and devastating suffering in the face of their unrepentant tormentors, Kurak is a tough watch throughout – astoundingly, the cruelty in the film outranks that of Bride Kidnapping, Kyrgyz filmmaker Mirlan Abdykalykov’s 2023 film about the abduction and forced marriage of a young woman into a family of small-time crooks. Just like the latter film, Kurak’s topicality, message and gritty realism will resonate with both festival programmers and social activists after its premiere in the Vision Asia competition at the Busan International Film Festival.

The film begins with archive news footage of a women’s rights demonstration in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek. The event has barely begun when thugs appear on the scene and begin to beat up the protesters; rather than stopping the men, the police start arresting the women instead. A real-life visual record of the blatant collusion between state power and chauvinist goons, these devastating images serve as an ominous overture to the horror that is to follow.

Jyldyz (Begaiym Asanakunova) is the more childlike of the film’s two protagonists. Raised by her loving factory-worker single-mother Nargiza (Ainura Kachkynbek Kyzy), the diligent student is looking forward to life in university and beyond – and a meeting with someone she has been happily chatting with online. Unfortunately, that man is Aibek (Aman Abdrahmanov), a sleazy scion who jokes about his wish to “kidnap” Jyldyz in order to get her away from her books for a night out on the town. This turns out to be more than just a morbid joke. After an unwilling visit to a dodgy drinking den and a spiked drink later, the young woman becomes Aibek’s latest dispensable trophy.

Her worldlier cousin Meerim (Aliman Ryspekova), meanwhile, fares no better. Unlike Jyldyz’s headstrong mother, Meerim’s shaman mom is more closely bound to so-called traditional values: a woman’s burden, she says, is to “endure and pray”. Trying to rebel against this idea and also to bring home a little more money, Meerim signs up to work as an erotic webcam model – a gig which draws her to the attention of Kanat (Atay Omurbekov), a corrupt cop who dresses up his bad deeds in extremist moral rhetoric, as he rails against the immorality of “the modern woman” while taking kickbacks from prostitution rackets.

“Kurak” is Kyrgyz for “patchwork”, and the two teens’ intertwining misfortunes are also tied with that of Jamila (Kalipa Tashtanova), a high-ranking TV journalist celebrated for her progressive news reports and her support for gender equality in the country. Beyond the limelight, however, she is also the mistress of a powerful politician – an ilicit liaison which has fatal consequences in her floundering attempt to help Nargiza seek justice for her daughter.

Through Erzhan Arakeev’s camerawork, Bishkek gradually turns into purgatory as the two teenagers plummet into the abyss. A dazed and bewildered Jyldyz is shown walking through streets lined with the hollow husks of would-be condominium towers, while lights and shadows instill desolation and anxiety in places as diverse as Nargiza’s workplace, Meerim’s house and Jamila’s office. Brimming with clarity in structure and purpose, Dzhumakmatova’s screenplay is consolidated in Anthony Akera’s crisp editing.

Directors: Erke Dzhumakmatova, Emial Atageldiev
Screenwriter: Erke Dzhumakmatova
Producers: Erke Dzhumakmatova, Kairat Birimkulov, Katerina Tarbo-Ignatenko, Pavel Feldman,
Alexander Seliverstov, Alexandra Hoesdorff, Désirée Nosbusch
Cast: Ainura Kachkynbek Kyzy, Aliman Ryspekova, Begaiym Asanakunova, Kalipa Tashtanova, Atay Omurbekov
Cinematography: Erzhan Arakeev
Editing: Anthony Akera
Production design: Svetlana Dubina
Music: Rafaelle Petrucci
Production companies: OYMO Studio, Human Films
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Kyrgyz, Russian
89 minutes

There is some added tension in that the audience knows that Yong-gi is in love with Ji-sook, but she doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know—which, to be sure, are two different things.

In any case, their tricky relationship, which also features a third wheel pal, Dum-bo, continues. They hang out at his place and get up to no good as kids do. Everybody seems content with the arrangement, even if Dum-bo doesn’t quite get Yong-gi’s devotion to a girl who may or may not be his girlfriend. The relationship between the trio rings true in ways that show director Han Chang-lok as especially attuned to the zaniness of youth, a state of mind reflected in his herky-jerky editing choices and camera movements.

In time, Han’s screenplay introduces a new variable into its mostly stable equation in the person—and perfect facial features—of Woo-joo Jung, a national judoka with 100,000 followers on Instagram. The school is immediately taken in by the young man, who is also a rich kid. Ji-sook is immediately enamoured of the newcomer. She throws herself at him as Yong-gi looks on. He seems to not be too worried about it all but, again, the viewer knows that can’t really be true.

Alongside this adolescent romantic triangle—with its incel-adjacent brushes—Funky Freaky Freaks has adult concerns. Yong-gi’s absent mother is shacking up with her partner and doesn’t seem to be interested in her son. Ji-sook is anorexic, estranged from her classmates, and has barely survived beatings from her father. Dum-bo has a phone sex gig where he plays a horny girl. All of which makes it seem as though Han has transplanted the troubled kids in the HBO series Euphoria to a Korean high school. But because his actors are skilled performers with superb interpersonal chemistry, they emerge as their own persons.

Could Funky Freaky Freaks do without locating the problems of crazed youth in the damaging actions and inactions of their parents? Certainly. The love triangle is the film’s most realised thread and if Han had chosen to blame the resulting harm on hormones, few would complain. He’s chosen a different route. As a first-time filmmaker, he has padded his screenplay with psychological insight that isn’t unique—children have been the products of their parent’s flaws and glories since the beginning of procreation. This is however, not a fatal flaw. Funky Freaky Freaks is worth the time spent with its crazy young people as they hurtle towards the bleak future they have created for themselves. Programmers and film market experts considering new Korean cinema should be looking this way.

Alongside the performances, Kim Jongsoo’s jagged camera movements, as well as Han and Kim Jihyun’s editing choices give the film a propulsive jolt from start to finish, as the story becomes darker and darker following the introduction of Woo-joo, a kid who has demons—parental and sexual—operating beneath his pretty facade.

Han is clearly a talented filmmaker with a great eye for performers and weird visual flourishes. His first film doesn’t quite score high in originality but he’s certainly a filmmaker to follow.

Director: HAN Chang-lok
Cast: Min-hyeong JOO, Ji-hye BAEK, Soo-hyun JEONG, Jun-hang SHIN
Producers: Younkyung BAE, Jiwon LEE
Screenplay: Chang-lok HAN
Cinematography: Jong-soo KIM
Production Design: Ye-sle KIM
Editor: Ji-hyun KIM, Chang-lok HAN
Production Companies: Korea National University of Arts, apocofilm
Venue: Busan Film Festival (Competition)
Duration: 87 minutes
Language: Korean

Bowing in the Vision Korea competition in Busan, where her 2017 feature Glass Garden also premiered as the festival’s opening film, Shin’s sixth feature deserves just as much attention and exposure as her award-winning, well-travelled and comparably star-powered 2022 film Hommage. Anchored by her two mesmerising young leads, whose poignant performances were suitably heightened by Yun Ji-woon’s atmospheric evocation of the urban and provincial locales they travel through, The Mutation is proof of her ability to combine artistry and her unwavering social concerns in whatever genre on offer.

Belying his skin colour and general appearance, Se-oh (the Nigerian Korean model-turned-actor Han Hyun-min) is Korean by birth and by bloodline – the only explanation he (and the viewer) is privy to is that he’s a “mutation”. Unsurprisingly, he is subjected to disdain, discrimination and gestures of desire for the exotic: a man calls him a “bushman” who should “go back” to his country, while a woman says she wants to have sex with him and, when he refuses, tries to frame him for robbing her.

Somehow, Shin might also even be putting the viewer’s own biases to the test, as Se-oh – a mild-mannered individual living in a small but very clean and well-appointed attic flat – doesn’t seem to fit the usual on-screen representation of a dark-skinned man in Korean cinema. (Contrast this with Han Hyun-min’s only film role so far, a bit part as a mechanic who revs cars up for illegal racing in the 2022 action thriller Secret Delivery.)

Having passed out during one of his shifts playing a white tiger (a mutant animal, you see) in an amusement park, Se-oh spends his sick leave drifting around, seemingly in a daze. He buys a very expensive suitcase and some matching clothes, a set-up which is supposed to facilitate his search for a new friend who could be by his side for the next two days. Drawing suspicion and even hostility from most people, he is approached by Sora (Lee Zoo-young), an artisan who makes handcrafted wooden tables for a living.

After spending their first night drinking and sleeping on park benches, the pair sets off on a journey of self-discovery and recovery. Slowly but surely, Shin intertwines their present-day tour of their haunts – a trip to Se-ho’s theme-park workplace, a visit to Sora’s small studio in a co-working space, and then finally her homecoming of sorts to a small town – with flashbacks about their past. Marching onwards, we gradually realise the source of their grief. For Se-oh, it’s his mother’s death and his father’s excommunication; for Sora, it’s the breakdown of her relationship with her girlfriend in a staunchly conservative Christian town.

“What is normal anyway?” says Sora, as someone challenges her for not being so. With The Mutation, Shin has offered a refined riposte to those trying to bully Se-oh, Sora and their kindred spirits into self-loathing or submission. With a nuanced screenplay mostly devoid of melodrama or sloganeering and cinematography defined by its considered framing and play on light and shadows, the film also offers relief to both the heart and the eye.

Director, screenwriter: Shin Su-won
Producer: Francis C.K. Lim
Cast: Han Hyun-min, Lee Zoo-young, Moon Geun-young, Lee Jung-eun
Director of photography: Yun Ji-woon
Editing: Woo Hee-jeong
Production design: Shin Woo-jung
Sound design: Kim Soo-hyun
Production company: June Film
World sales: Fine Cut
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision – Korea)
In Korean
107 minutes

Effectively a chronicle of a three-day, two-night period in which characters reminisce over their past ideals and reconcile them with their present lives, Leave the Cat Alone is drenched with silent fury and regret – with matching sights and sounds. Steering clear of melodrama, Shigaya has delivered a poised and poetic exploration about how one creates – not just works of art, but also a matching mindset which might stimulate creativity in the most mundane of circumstances.

The film revolves around a trio of aspiring artists (and a close friend) whose careers are ebbing, flowing or simply lying dormant. Mori (musician Soma Fujii, who also provided the score and songs in the film) is a conservatory graduate who spends most of his time at home, fiddling with sound effects for commissions from video game producers while stewing over his inability to finish his own songs. In stark contrast, his wife Maiko (Ren Taniguchi) has moved on from her career as a model to become a sought-after photographer preparing for her biggest show to date.

There is a passive-aggressive bust-up – Shigaya, who also penned the screenplay, hints at a fling when Maiko declines her coded request for some intimacy. Then Mori runs into his former girlfriend Asako (Yukino Murakami). Through an intriguing flashback offering two versions of their past lives – the major difference being who took the initiative in starting the relationship years ago – the viewer is given the opportunity to compare their then and now. Adding to this mix is their best buddy Chika (Meiry Mochizuki), once the epitome of emotional stability and now running into problems on her own.

At one point during their reunion, Asako tells Mori she has stopped painting because great art could only come from great suffering. Given what the viewer is privy to, however, this bombastic romanticization of art simply doesn’t hold: emotional closure sometimes offers the opportunity for another new and creative beginning, as seen from Mori’s and Asako’s trajectory. Takahiro Sakata’s editing contributes to the unhurried, introspective vibe of the film, while Ryo Hirai manages to represent music, photography, painting and minimalist interior design in the most appealing of ways. Navel-gazing or not, the cool cats among the cinema-goers will certainly approve.

Director, screenwriter: Daisuke Shigaya
Producer: Hiro Itaya
Cast: Soma Fujii, Yukino Murakami, Ran Taniguichi, Meiry Mochizuki
Cinematography: Ryo Hirai
Editing: Takahiro Sakata
Art direction: Rat
Music: Soma Fujii
Sound design: Rentaro Syono, Syotaro Arakawa
Production companies: HUT Pictures Inc.
World sales: Nikkatsu
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Japanese
102 minutes

It’s a story about teen pregnancy and the abuse of power, about the way that women sacrifice to maintain the dignity of undeserving men, about the harsh reality of being a single mother in Korean society. It’s also a warm, funny and lovely portrait of a friendship growing between two teenage schoolgirls who find themselves roomed together in their school dormitory and forge a bond in spite of the various machinations above. Yoo Jaein’s film is her first feature, her graduation film from the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) and receives its world premiere in Busan this week. It’s an accomplished debut that indicates a delicate eye for emotional heft.

When the film begins, schoolgirl Yun-ji’s (Sim Subin) relationship with her homeroom teacher Mr. Han is already over. He’s not replying to her messages and is absent from school – perhaps Yun-ji’s reluctance to get an abortion has something to do with it. In a desperate attempt to reconnect with him, Yun-ji buys some pills on the internet to induce a miscarriage and, unable to pay for them herself, she steals the money from her friend and roommate, Kyung-sun (Lee Jiwon). A wisecracking and entrepreneurial class clown, she has enough money hidden away and comes home one evening to find it – and Yun-ji – gone.

The narrative itself becomes a bit winding, first following the duo as they attempt to secure Yun-ji a way to secure an abortion after her first attempt, which spent their combined capital, failed. The cost in a clinic is prohibitive, the drugs online are unreliable, and the option of going to a veterinary clinic becomes the only viable one, despite being a horrible prospect. Kyung-sun comes up with plans – not least the purloining of money some money from Mr. Han’s wife, Min-young (Jang Sun) on the basis that the Mr. Han owes them both their money back.

Kyung-sun is fairly endearing from the get-go, from her quick-witted remarks in the classroom to her side-hustle making up vape flavours to sell to her classmates out of her rucksack. Perhaps her most likeable quality is the zero tolerance she has for Mr. Han, presented with a no-nonsense defiance by Lee Jiwon. When Yun-ji begins to waver over whether or not to terminate her pregnancy – wanting, effectively, to give Mr. Han the child he has always longed for – Kyung-sun is quick to question what a man who got one of his pupils pregnant has done to deserve such respect.

This becomes a refrain in the En Route To, with both Yun-ji and Min-young having to come to terms with the position they’ve been left in and what their responsibility is to protect this man who has bailed on them both. The decision of whether or not to have the baby, like the decision of whether or not to let the truth come out, become important political questions for both women. For Kyung-sun the answers are glaringly obvious. The more challenging question for Kyung-sun is how to come to terms with being the child of a single mother who had her very young – baggage she can’t help but bring to her opinions about what her friend should do.

Baek Jaeryung’s cinematography is unassuming, punching in for key emotional or narrative moments, but often with the camera sitting at a remove with the characters in long- to mid-shots that emphasize their relationship to one another. The two roommates in particular begin the film as tolerant of one another, appearing in the background of one another’s shot, the focal length provided their physical distance on the screen. Over the course of the narrative they grow closer, from Kyung-sun tenderly offering a hand to hold in their room, to heads rested on each other’s shoulders in the film’s affecting finale. Yoo Jaein marshals their shifting dynamic through its up and down impressively and in doing so has created a charming film about the resilient power provided by female friendship.

Director, screenplay: Yoo Jaein
Cast: Sim Subin, Lee Jiwon, Jang Sun, Lee Ye-in, Jang Jae-hee
Producer: Kim Jihyoung
Cinematography: Baek Jaeryung
Music: Lee Eunjoo
Sound: Kim Soohyun
Production design: Ahn Dukjin
Production companies: Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA) (Korea)
Venue: Busan Film Festival (Competition)
In Korean
106 minutes

But here he is, taking a break after a not particularly grueling meeting with the local press a day after receiving the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award from the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF). The honorary prize is the latest of many given to him since his travel ban was rescinded earlier this year, a twist which allowed him to present his latest film It Was Just An Accident in Cannes.

Panahi’s whirlwind trip to Korea is just one of the many stops on his latest international tour, with the director departing for the San Sebastian festival just three days after touching down in Busan. Then again, he said it’s a trip he wouldn’t have missed, given his close affiliation with BIFF: his first film, The White Balloon (1995), participated in the very first edition of the festival, and he has since returned for another five times.

“Before I was prevented from leaving the country, I’ve always been coming to the festival,” says Panahi at the press conference. “I’m sorry this visit was very short, as I had to travel to many countries… I really hope I can come here and stay more, bring my wife and travel around and meet everybody, especially since I love to eat seafood from East Asia.”

Culinary jokes aside, Panahi says his relationship with Busan was built on his long-running friendship with Kim Ji-seok, the festival’s co-founder and programming chief who passed away during a visit to the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.

“When I was prevented from leaving Iran, he came and visited me,” Panahi recalls. “Before he went to Cannes and left us [in 2017], he came to Iran for a film festival and came to my house; we said we would meet in Korea. So this time I wanted to pay tribute to him in his home [country].”

Panahi’s very brief appearance in Busan might also be down to the imminent opening of It Was Just An Accident in Korean theaters on October 1. While the film will also unspool in French cinemas on the same day, the time difference between the two countries –Seoul is seven hours ahead of Paris – will make Korea the first country where Panahi’s latest will be commercially released.

The director’s appearance in Busan came right after the announcement of the selection of It Was Just An Accident as France’s official submission in the Best International Feature category at the Academy Awards. The film was co-produced by Iran and partners in France and Luxembourg, with post-production completed in Paris before its Palme d’Or-winning premiere at Cannes.

Expressing his frustration over not being able to represent his own country at the Oscars, Panahi called for changes to the Academy’s rules in order to heighten the presence of more independent-minded and anti-establishment artists, at the most high-profile film ceremony of the year.

“If we wanted to submit the film [for the long-list at the Oscars], we have to get permission from our own country,” he said. “In the closed-up kind of country we are in, we have to get permission – it’s a problem for a country like Iran or China. So I think the Academy should find a way to not tie filmmakers to [their] countries.”

He said such complications had once scuppered his 2006 film Offside, about a group of young women struggling against the authorities to get into a football match, from competing at the Academy Awards. “Sony [Pictures Classics] distributed the film and wanted to introduce it to the Academy, but the regulation was that the film must be screened in [the filmmaker’s] own country. But [the officials] didn’t accept the screening of the film, even for one week, so Sony had to give up.”

“I think independent filmmakers must get together to find a way… so that they will not face this kind of problem in their own country,” he added.

Official reaction to Panahi’s success at Cannes in May was muted, with the authorities remaining silent when the filmmaker returned to Iran from France. In a recent article celebrating the “global recognition” of Iranian cinema at international film festivals and the Academy Awards, the government-backed Tehran Times only referred to Panahi’s first two films – the comparatively less political The White Balloon and The Mirror. There was no mention of It Was Just An Accident.

Panahi’s freedom to travel in and out of Iran, plus what seems to be a palpable liberalization of the Islamic Republic’s once-stringent moral laws, would suggest that the country may be undergoing a thaw. But the director said the struggle continues for him and his peers.

“My [uncredited] co-writer for [It Was Just An Accident] was sentenced to jail, but two days ago he was freed,” he said. “He wasn’t sentenced [to prison] only for this film – he was 48 years old and he has spent a fourth of his life in jail. He’s a journalist, a human rights activist and one of the best men I have ever met. So when you are living under a dictatorship, the pressure from the government will make you face a lot of problems. You must find a way to live, aiming to make the films you want to.”

Designed as the first of an “Exile Trilogy” – the second installment, tentatively titled Life Says: Still We Must Live, is already in post-production – Another Birth diverges from past festival-acclaimed Tajik films by veering away from the bleak realism proffered by (male) auteurs in the 1990s and 2000s such as Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov or Jamshed Usmonov. Backed by funding from the Doha Film Institute and featuring the input of with a Berlin-based DP and production designer, Columbia-educated Kalandar transforms the rugged terrain of rural Tajikistan into a land of possibilities and perils for a wide-eyed yet resilient eight-year-old.

The title alludes, partly, to the first scene of the film in which a writhing woman is seen going through a painful childbirth. The point-of-view is that of Parastu (the wonderful Shukrona Navruzbekova), a young girl somehow much more mature in terms of her sensitivity about her surroundings than her years would suggest. While her friends get excited about watching an animation movie on perhaps the only television set in the village, Parastu is keen to reflect about the beauty and melancholy of her world.

Through ajar doors, cracks in walls or curtains fluttering over windows in the night, Parastu bears witness to the beginnings and endings of human existence, and the pain and heartbreak punctuating lives in the middle of nowhere. It’s a worldview imposed on her by her mother Parvin (played by the director herself), who forces the girl to memorise Farrokhzad’s “I Pity the Garden” and “Let Us Believe In the Dawn of the Cold Season”, two poems denoting the resilience and revolutionary potential of those who, like her, are “withering away in sorrow” as an abandoned, ostracised woman.

Saddened by her mother’s pain and the constant craving of her grandfather (Niezmamad Navruzbekov) for a missing son, Parastu roams the land and sets off with her best friend Guliston (Shoira Abdulgaezkhonova) to look for a mythical spirit that could rejuvenate her loved ones. Through their small expeditions, the world opens up for them and for the viewers: Janis Brod’s camerawork (with additional input from Vladimir Usoltsev) presents Tajikistan’s Shakhdara Valley in the most lyrical of ways.

Among such scenes is one set on a tree-laden footpath where Parastu strikes up a conversation about art and matters of the heart with a mysterious old man (referred to as the “Wise Man” in the credits, and played by Mamadmuso Mamadaliev). As they leave behind them a valise filled with books and then walk into the distance, the camerawork evokes the beauty of a late-Tarkovsky long shot. But even simpler things in the character’s milieu, such as the tilling of the land or the making of bread, are evocative.

The source of the enigmatic Parvin’s solitude and shame will eventually be revealed towards the end of the film, but the beating heart of Another Birth is Parastu: to quote Farrokhzad, she’s the young, yet-untarnished hero trying to rewrite the “history of histories” weighing down on her family and forsaken village. Young Shukrona manages to evoke at once the curiosity and the courage of her character, making Parastu a paragon for change in a society where nothing ever seems to change. It’s an allegory that chimes perfectly with Farrokhzad’s audacious cri de coeur, half a century past.

Director, screenwriter, executive producer: Isabelle Kalandar
Cast: Shukrona Navruzbekova, Isabelle Kalandar, Shoira Abdulgaezkhonova
Producers: Isabelle Kalandar, Shahnoz Eronshoh
Cinematography: Janis Brod, Vladmir Usoltsev
Editing: Kseniia Filippova, Aleksei Reidel
Production design: Marie Parakenings, Elizaveta Dzutseva
Music: Noah K, Rosie K
Sound designer: Alexandre Kuzin
Production company: IZK Films
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Tajik
66 minutes

Such good intentions, and the pressure-cooker tension brought about by the fine turns of the film’s young cast, are punctured by screenwriter Kosuke Mugai’s decision to stop the narrative, shift back in time and start over. It’s a convenient yet increasingly wearisome way of establishing more heartening back stories for the three seemingly amoral protagonists.

This is also perhaps the reason the film, the first full-fledged made-for-cinema feature for the Japanese small-screen content studio The Seven, is (and feels) protracted. The two-hour-plus title bowed in competition at Busan before it opens in Japan on October 24. The presence of Takumi Kitamura and Go Hayano – a reunion of sorts after their collaboration on The Seven’s Netflix hit Yu Yu Hakusho, should propel the film to domestic success and nipponophile markets, but further festival bookings might be harder to come by.

“Baka” is Japanese for “a fool”, and fools – or specifically, their identities – are what Mamoru (Yuta Hayashi) and Takuya (Kitamura) rely on to earn a living. Pretending to be single women, the male pair chat men up online and try to find those who are lonely, gullible and, most importantly, in need of money. They then send their female associate (Mizuka Yamashita) to meet their “mark” and convince him,  in ways we don’t get to see on screen, to sell them his identity, which the pair will then resell to a client who needs a new one, for example, to shake off a criminal record or a debt.

The two young men are smooth operators. They juggle different conversations on a dozen phones with ease, and Takuya actually shows the younger Mamoru how to scam/seduce men more convincingly in those online conversations. The key lies in trying lines out in a squealy voice – and with matching “girly” body gestures – before typing them into the chatbox. The most important thing, Takuya says, lies in the belief that it’s a fair deal, and that everyone manages to get to what they want in the transaction – the seller, the buyer, intermediaries such as themselves, and also their slimy boss Sato (Goichi Mine).

It doesn’t take a noir specialist to predict the two young men will have the tables turned against them and become fools themselves. We see Sato warning Mamoru to stay away from his buddy the next day; Takuya buying ID cards off his own mentor Kajitani (Ayano); and then Sato asking Mamoru to clean Takuya’s blood-drenched apartment. Long before one can say good riddance, however, the story shifts back a few months, to the point of where the two young men – one already a savvy con-artist, the other a newly arrived stray from the provinces – meet each other in a cramped dorm and become friends and partners in crime.

So far, so good: slowly, Takuya’s hard-boiled veneer unravels to reveal a confused youngster with his own regrets about life and his doubts about roping yet another poor boy into his scheme. Rather than moving on from this, however, the film eventually reverses gear again, transporting the viewer even further back so that the focus falls on Kajitani, as he takes Takuya under his wing and inducts him into the business. Arguably, this could be useful in understanding Kajitani’s actions in the here-and-now of the story, but all this exposition distracts the viewer from the running and chasing which gives the film – with Tomoo Ezaki’s warmly-hued lensing and Hiroyasu Koizumi’s understated yet evocative production design – its taut identity.

Director: Koto Nagata
Screenwriter: Kosuke Mugai, based on a novel by Jun Nishio
Cast: Takumi Kitamura, Go Ayano, Yuta Hayashi, Mizuki Yamashita, Yuma Yamoto
Producers: Kumi Kobata, Kazuya Shimomura
Executive producers: Shuhei Sekiguchi
Cinematography: Tomoo Ezaki
Editing: Ryuji Miyajima
Production design: Hiroyasu Koizumi
Music: Yoshiaki Dewa
Production companies: The Seven
World sales: The Seven
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Competition)
In Japanese
131 minutes

What was the biggest interest of yours regarding the 30th anniversary edition?

“Change and reform in every possible way.” I believe we’ve vastly improved both the programs and the festival operation despite the short period of time, which is reflected in the positive feedback and anticipations we garnered after revealing the titles and guest lineup. I saw this comment on our programs on social media: “BIFF, is this your grand finale? You are not coming back next year?” It was the greatest compliment because we poured that much of our effort into this edition. But we are planning to return next year, and the year after, treating each edition as our last. My years as a programmer taught me the ins and outs of the festival, which really helped our team make this happen in such short time.

BIFF is having a September festival this year, the first since 1998. Was it more challenging for you to prepare this edition?

My term as the festival director started in March, essentially leaving me with only 6 months for preparation. Naturally it has been frantic like never before. But we were never overwhelmed. Everything stayed under control and the process has been exciting as always. While this year, the National Sports Festival and Chuseok left us with no choice, from next year on, I think we should go back to hosting in early October.

BIFF is introducing a new section, Competition, while New Currents, formerly regarded as BIFF’s most highlighted section, is now merged with Korean Cinema Today – Vision into a new section called Vision. What are the thoughts behind this change?

We questioned the effectiveness of running New Currents (films by first and second-time filmmakers) and Jiseok (films by filmmakers with more than three titles) separately. Rather than dividing newcomers and established/master directors, we decided to give a bigger, unified platform where their works can interact.

My experience as the Korean cinema programmer informed the decision as well. For example, the 2022 New Currents Winner A WILD ROOMER by Lee Jeong-hong was widely praised by Korean critics and key domestic media but enjoyed far less international attention than it deserved. Had we introduced it with certain leverage such as “the Competition winner,” the outcome might have been different. The new section provides a system where we could maximize our capability of introducing a new talent. Asian and Korean filmmakers can benefit from the expanded influence, even with titles that have already premiered elsewhere, and in turn, it could also encourage global filmmakers to be more interested in Asian cinema and motivated to visit Busan.

Meanwhile, Vision – Asia and Vision – Korea are designed to give more space for the important works that are not included in Competition.

The choice for the opening film, NO OTHER CHOICE, raised a lot of buzz. What considerations went under the process?

Inviting NO OTHER CHOICE as our opening film is the fruit of the finest collaborative work between BIFF, the production company Moho Film, and the distributor CJ Entertainment. We agreed that this film deserves to be appreciated by as many audiences as possible at the opening ceremony for its remarkable achievement in both the artistic quality and the public appeal, which is what Korean cinema has always strived for.

Were there any films that particularly stood out and you wish more people could see? Also, what program are you the proudest of?

I would like to highlight two films that will have their world premieres at BIFF: LEAVE THE CAT ALONE by Shigaya Daisuke and GLOAMING IN LUOMU by Zhang Lu. The former displays the delicate sensibility that can often be found in the recent Japanese New Wave films. I think we should all remember Shigaya’s name as well as the fact that his first steps were taken at BIFF Competition. Zhang Lu’s name is already that of a master and it makes me burst with joy that his latest will be shown to the world for the first time in Busan. The sense of sudden awakening amid conversations and landscapes gives the film a miraculous charm. I’m also very proud of what we have prepared for Special Program in Focus, Master Class and Cine Class. The reason will be evident when you see the guest lineups.

This year, Asia Content & Film Market (ACFM) introduces a new program, InnoAsia, to host panels and workshops and seek new possibilities of cutting-edge technology including AI. With debates in the film industry around the use of generative AI, what’s your view on AI’s influence on filmmaking?

Personally, I share Bong Joon-ho’s sentiment: “I want to make a film that AI would never be able to.” As a traditional cinephile, I am quite doubtful about the value of AI filmmaking. Some say its strength lies in the convenience, but humanity has always created greatness even when things were never convenient. Perhaps that’s the 20^th-century film lover in me speaking. That’s why, as the festival director, I try to stay open-minded and learn more. In that regard, I am curious to see what these discussions and explorations we try at ACFM will bring.

At the press conference, “the crisis in Korean cinema” was one of the most uttered phrases. What does BIFF think is the biggest crisis in Korean cinema, and what role should it play to help?

The crisis is very clear: the number of audiences going to the cinema is at an all-time low. There may be a lot of great opinions on why, but I can only comment on what a film festival can do. A film festival provides a chance for “an event” in which a cinematic experience is maximized. The physicality and community we experience at a cinema is best reached at festivals. I hope BIFF could inspire our visitors to return to the cinema more often after the festival ends.

What do you think is the unique appeal or role that BIFF has, in comparison to other international film festivals?

Of all film festivals in the world, BIFF is the only one that hosts a competition section exclusively for Asian films as its main program. This alone defines our distinctive appeal and speaks to our role. In Busan, filmmakers and film professionals will have a ground to share their work in this unique context while film lovers will have a new window for such beautiful slate of works.

What is the path you envision for the next 30 years of BIFF? What would the 60^th anniversary look like?

Looking back on the 30^th anniversary after 30 more years later, I hope it will be remembered as the year of meaningful changes. But these are just phrases. As I have said earlier, we will be just doing it every year like it’s our last.

–Interview by Cho Hyo-jin