Busan 2025

Amid widespread concern over the health of the Korean film industry, the Busan International Film Festival celebrated its 30th edition hosting domestic films – and audiences – marked by their variety and vitality.

In ‘Gloaming in Luomu’, Korean-Chinese filmmaker Zhang Lu offers his most radical reworking of the theme of searching for a long-vanished soulmate, in a film that unfolds like a delirious dream.

South Korean rom-com royalty Bae Suzy and The Squid Game star Lee Jin-wook descend on Busan with the slick, subdued and fastidiously chaste ‘Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club for the Brokenhearted’.

Scathing social commentary meets brash body horror in the unclassifiable and utterly compelling ‘Kok Kok Kokoook’, Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap’s first feature.

Zhang Lu conjures an enigmatic, engaging and visually enchanting cinematic experience with ‘Gloaming in Luomu’.

Sri Lankan cineaste Vimukthi Jayasundara re-emerges from his decade-long feature-filmmaking hiatus with ‘Spying Stars’, a moving story about death and mourning packaged as an audacious sci-fi fantasy.

A dying filmmaker struggles to bring one final project to fruition and his wife attempts to realise this last wish in “By Another Name”, Korean indie filmmaker Lee Jea-han’s uneventful entry to Busan’s new competition.
 

A dying filmmaker struggles to bring one final project to fruition and his wife attempts to realise this last wish in “By Another Name”, Korean indie filmmaker Lee Jea-han’s plain and uneventful entry to Busan International Film Festival’s newly minted main competition.