September 17, 2025
SEOUL – In September 1996, German film programmer Erika Gregor let out a shriek in a darkened theater. A rat had just bitten her foot. For weeks later, filmgoers in Busan watched movies to the soundtrack of meowing — legend has it that the organizers had released cats to hunt down the rats.
That this scrappy latecomer would become Asia’s premier film event seemed about as likely as Korea winning an Oscar. Both would become reality.
Two years before the rodent incident, a handful of film professionals and academics —Lee Yong-kwan from Gyeongseong University, the late Kim Ji-seok from Busan Arts College, critic Jeon Yang-joon — had started making the rounds, pitching their pipe dream to anyone who’d listen. Korea in 1994 was barely on the cultural map; Busan, even less so.
Kim Dong-ho, a career civil servant who’d spent decades in the culture ministry, agreed to helm the operation after hearing their proposal. Now 88, he recalls those early days with gusto. “When I told people I’d taken the job, my friends who knew the film business were like — don’t do it,” he says. “They kept saying, ‘If they can’t make it work in Seoul, how are you going to pull off an international festival in Busan?'”
The organizers spent 1996 hunting for sponsors. “I met with literally everyone. Got turned down by basically everyone, too,” Kim recalls. They eventually managed to secure funding from major entities, including the now-defunct conglomerate Daewoo.
That first edition screened 173 films from 31 countries at the Suyeongman Yachting Center overlooking the harbor. Mike Leigh’s “Secrets & Lies” opened the festival. Brenda Blethyn, fresh off her best actress win at Cannes, gave a press conference on a boat — a publicity stunt meant to underscore Busan’s identity as a port city. Despite the hiccups, it took off.
What everyone remembers from those early years wasn’t just the programming; it was the jubilant chaos that erupted nightly. After each day’s screenings, Busan’s coastal strip transformed into one massive, booze-soaked party. Tented bars lined the beach where filmmakers and cinephiles mingled and drank until dawn.
Kim Jung-sun, now a film professor at Dongseo University in Busan, was an aspiring film student then. “The energy was unreal. You could meet Tsai Ming-liang, see his new work, bump into Jeanne Moreau. For anyone who loved movies, it was this release valve for everything we’d been desperate to see.”
By its 10th anniversary in 2005, BIFF had grown to 307 films, consistently drawing around 200,000 attendees. A year earlier, Time magazine was calling it Asia’s premier festival. The event had become Korean cinema’s gateway to the international circuit. Before BIFF, only three Korean films had ever made it to Cannes; after, four or five annually.
The festival also opened doors for filmmakers across Asia. Its Asian Cinema Fund, founded in 2007, provides development and post-production support for independent features throughout the continent. The Asian Contents & Film Market became the region’s primary hub for buying, selling and financing movies.
In 2011, the festival moved to the architecturally ambitious Busan Cinema Center in Centum City, Haeundae-gu’s sprawling urban center.
“BIFF basically created Korean cinema’s international presence,” says Kim Jung-sun. “Before this, Korean audiences saw movies as entertainment, period. The festival changed that — made them see it as art.”
Rarely does a film festival find itself in the crosshairs of national politics. In 2014, BIFF programmed “The Truth Shall Not Sink With Sewol,” a documentary alleging government mishandling of the ferry disaster that killed over 300 people, mostly high school students on a field trip. Busan Mayor Suh Byung-soo — a close ally of conservative then-President Park Geun-hye — tried to block the screening, along with other city officials.
The film showed anyway, and retaliation was swift.
The Busan city government slashed funding by half. Festival director Lee Yong-kwan was indicted on embezzlement charges in what many viewed as a political hit job. In January 2016, he stepped down.
“Sure, the documentary was biased,” says a former festival official. “But so what? Once the festival picks a film, that’s it — you screen it.”
Film bodies across the country called for a boycott. Support poured in from overseas, with festival programmers and film critics worldwide rallying behind BIFF’s independence. An internal probe into the Culture Ministry in 2018 under the following liberal Moon Jae-in administration confirmed what everyone had long suspected: The Park government had orchestrated a pressure campaign through the ministry and Busan’s city officials.
The aftermath split BIFF’s leadership in subsequent years. Hard-liners called for a total boycott. Moderates pushed to negotiate. When Kim Dong-ho and actor Kang Su-yeon stepped in to manage the crisis in 2016, they faced accusations of being government stooges for opposing the boycott. Both stepped down in 2017.
Kim defends keeping the festival running: “Look at any festival worldwide — once it stops, even for a year, it never really comes back,” he says. “You can’t let it stop. That’s just how it is.”
Even after Park’s ouster and the election of Moon as South Korea’s president, the festival couldn’t escape the dysfunction. Lee Yong-kwan returned as chairperson in 2018 despite his conviction. Critics accused him of packing the board with allies and running BIFF like his personal operation — claims he denied in a June 2023 press conference.
The same month, 18 film organizations demanded resignations from the festival’s top brass. Both Lee and operations director Cho Jong-kook stepped down.
“It was worse than the Sewol mess,” according to a former BIFF official. “Just this endless cycle of power grabs and misunderstandings. Everyone watching was like, ‘This festival’s completely lost it.'”
Since 2024, Park Kwang-su, a founding member, has been in charge.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the global festival circuit to a halt in 2020. Cannes canceled outright. Venice ran at half-capacity. Busan faced the same reckoning.
When South Korea’s COVID-19 cases spiked in August 2020, BIFF organizers pushed the 25th edition back two weeks to avoid the country’s Chuseok holiday travel surge. Major events got axed, including the opening and closing ceremonies. Each film would screen once instead of three times.
“We agonized over whether we should go ahead at all,” then-Chair Lee Yong-kwan told reporters that September.
The 2021 edition brought back limited in-person events, including six Actor’s House sessions and a masterclass with Leos Carax. The Asia Project Market ran hybrid, with international participants joining virtually while Korean attendees, wearing masks, met in person. A testing frenzy erupted when one participant tested positive after the festival, though everyone else tested negative.
Attendance that year stood at 76,072 — a respectable figure for 50 percent capacity limits, though far below the quarter-million crowds of previous years.
By 2022, BIFF returned to full operations. International guests flew in again. The parties resumed. Outdoor screenings came back. The festival screened 242 films from 71 countries, drawing 161,000 attendees — still below prepandemic numbers, but enough to signal that one of Asia’s biggest film events had weathered the storm.
This year brings something BIFF has never tried in its three decades: competition. After 29 years as a non-competitive showcase, the festival will hand out prizes to 14 Asian films.
It’s a risky bet that has industry watchers nervous. The festival runs Sept. 17-26, right after the Venice and Toronto film festivals. Filmmakers eyeing world premieres will almost certainly pick those established heavyweights over Busan’s untested competition section.
“Competition’s a completely different game,” says Oh Dong-jin, a film critic and former BIFF board member who co-directed the Asian Film Market in 2019. “You can’t just grab films that already premiered somewhere else. You need to really hunt for the undiscovered stuff, especially across Asia.”
Then there’s the elephant in the room — the dominance of streaming and what that means for film festivals trying to stay relevant.
The question of whether festivals should premiere Netflix films that bypass theaters entirely has split the global circuit. Since 2021, BIFF has featured a section dedicated to streaming content, named “On Screen.” The festival surprised everyone last year by opening with Netflix’s “Uprising,” co-written and produced by Park Chan-wook. This year brings more streaming titles to the slate, including Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein” and Byun Sung-hyun’s “Good News,” both Netflix productions.
The purists hate it. The pragmatists shrug. Everyone else just wants to enjoy the movies.
“The thing is, BIFF has this identity — it’s the Asian film festival,” says Kim Jung-sun. “Sure, Western festivals don’t ignore Asian cinema anymore, but we’re still the minority there. Where else do Asian films get to be the main event? Where else do they get presented with this kind of understanding, this investment in what they’re actually about? Nowhere. Just Busan.”
Kim Dong-ho, who steered the festival through its scrappy beginnings, remains optimistic about the festival’s future. “When I talk to filmmakers now, everyone pretty much agrees: Good movies find their way to theaters. Festivals, too,” he says.
“They’re celebrations, you know? Where audiences actually meet filmmakers, actors, everyone. I think we’ll be fine. We’ll keep going.”