Korea won nothing at its own festival's competition

Photo: BUSAN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The Busan International Film Festival handed out the six prizes of its competition section on Thursday night and sent every one of them out of the country, leaving the host nation without an award from the strand it created last year.

Majid Majidi's Midday Meal took best film for Iran, Eddie Cahyono's IBUKU the special jury prize for Indonesia and Japan, and Lee Yun Chan best director for Taiwan with To Be Ordinary, according to the festival's published results. Zhou Xun and Himeno Kashun shared the acting prize for China and Japan, and Li Danfeng took artistic contribution for China.

All six Busan Awards went abroad on Thursday. Korean films took fourteen other prizes, almost every one from a category only Korean films could enter.

Thirteen films competed, three of them South Korean, AFP reported. The jury was chaired by Zhang Yimou and included the Korean director July Jung and the Korean actor Choi Hee-seo among its seven members.

A year ago the same section behaved differently. At the 30th edition Korean work took the special jury prize, a share of the acting award and the New Currents prize, as the festival's archive records.

This year New Currents went to Shashank Walia's Birds in the Dark from India. Lim Hayeon's Beach Fictions received a special mention, and that mention is the only thing Korean cinema took from either of the festival's internationally judged competitions.

Elsewhere the results look entirely different. Korean films and performers won fourteen awards across the Vision ceremony and the documentary and short strands, including two Actor of the Year prizes, the Directors Guild of Korea award and three separate prizes for Jeong Jihye's FULL MOON.

Almost all of those sit in categories no foreign film can enter. The K-MOVIE Award, the KBS Independent Film Award, the Korean strands of the Mecenat and Sonje prizes and the Korean audience award are reserved for Korean work by design.

That is a reasonable way to run a festival that exists partly to develop a national industry, and Busan has always done it. The competition was added in 2025 precisely to sit outside that arrangement and be judged against the region as a whole.

Its best film prize is now the one the Academy added in May to its list of six festival awards that grant entry to the international feature category. On the Academy's published submission requirements, the eligibility period for winning such an award closed on 30 September, fifteen days before Busan announced.

Majidi dedicated his prize to the people of Iran, praising them for never giving up through conflict, sanctions and shortages of medicine, AFP reported. Zhang said the seven jurors had been unanimous.

One Korean name appears on the festival's honours list. Kim Dong-ho received the Korean Cinema Award at the opening ceremony, for founding the festival in 1996.

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