The 29th edition of the Busan International Film Festival opened Wednesday night with top stars like Lee Jung-jae (Squid Game), Song Joong-ki (Descendants of the Sun) and Gang Dong-won (Peninsula) walking the red carpet under the towering dome of the Busan Cinema Center, in front of more than 4,500 guests.
With a new leadership team headed by chairman and veteran filmmaker Park Kwang-su as well as Ellen Y.D. Kim, the festival awarded the Asian Filmmaker of the Year honors to Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Kurosawa won Venice’s Silver Lion for best director in 2020 with Wife of a Spy.
The festival’s congratulatory video for Kurosawa featured praises from fellow Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Korean director Bong Joon-ho — both sharing how Kurosawa’s works inspired their own cinematic craft.
In his speech onstage, Kurosawa acknowledged how BIFF has provided a platform for many of his works, saying that the festival “witnessed almost half my career.”
BIFF has also introduced a new Camellia Award, in partnership with main sponsor Chanel, to celebrate women in cinema. This year, the honor was given to production designer Ryu Seong-hie, who has worked on seminal Korean films like Bong’s Memories of Murder and The Host as well as Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy and Decision to Leave.
During her speech, Ryu recounted several moments in her career where she was told that genre films were a domain only for males and that her production design services would be required only on melodramas or romance films.
“Being rejected countless times by production companies, I decided to survive and change their bias,” Ryu said.
She pointed out that there are many women in the film industry who have been overlooked because of their gender, although they possess similar abilities to “express all the joys and sorrows of human life” through cinema. “There are many gifted young women doing their best in all sectors of the Korean film industry and I cheer them on,” Ryu added.
A hush fell across the audience when the festival’s in memoriam video honoring the late Lee Sun-kyun started playing. Besides appearing in Parasite, Lee starred in titles like My Mister, Coffee Prince and A Hard Day. Posthumously bestowing the Korean Cinema Award to Lee, BIFF is also running a program showcasing five of his films, including Parasite, as well as one episode from My Mister.
The festival will screen a total of 279 films from 63 countries. BIFF opened with Netflix‘s Uprising, which is co-written by Park Chan-wook and stars Gang alongside Park Jeong-min, Cha Seung-won, Kim Shin-rock, Jin Sun-kyu and Jung Sung-il. The festival will close October 11 with Spirit World by Singaporean filmmaker Eric Khoo.