Busan's top prize now qualifies a film for the Oscars without its country selecting it
Busan opens on Monday with A-list status and a new power: its top prize now qualifies a film for the international feature Oscar without any national committee selecting it. Two countries with films in this year's competition did not submit to the Academy at all.
The 31st Busan International Film Festival runs 6 to 15 October, and it arrives having changed category. The festival now holds A-list classification from the International Federation of Film Producers' Associations, the designation held by Cannes, Venice and Berlin.
The consequence that matters is buried in the small print: the winner of the Busan Award now qualifies for Academy consideration in the international feature category without needing official national selection.
That rule change lands the day after the Oscar deadline closes
Submissions for the 99th international feature Oscar shut on 30 September. Among the countries that did not submit at all: China and Iran.
Both have films in Busan's competition this year.
So a Chinese or Iranian film that no national committee put forward can now reach the Academy by winning a prize in Busan. For a category that has run on state-level selection since 1956, that is a structural shift, and it arrives in the same week as the deadline it routes around.
Zhang Yimou is presiding over the first competition that carries it
The jury is chaired by Zhang Yimou, with South Korean actress Choi Hee-seo, Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, Kazakh actress Samal Yeslyamova, Japanese director Kei Ishikawa, and South Korean filmmakers Jung Joo-ri and Tran Thi Bich Ngoc.
Thirteen Asian films compete, from South Korea, Japan, China, Indonesia, Iran and Uzbekistan.
A jury of seven, chaired by the director of Raise the Red Lantern, now effectively holds one Oscar-eligibility slot in its gift. Whether anybody at the festival is framing it that way is another question; nobody has said so out loud.
The rest of the programme
- Opening film — The Table: Day and Night, Kim Jong-kwan, a South Korean romantic anthology.
- Closing ceremony hosted by Yim Si-wan.
- Camellia Award, which honours women in cinema — Ann Hui.
- Asian Filmmaker of the Year — Michelle Yeoh.
- Also awarded: the New Currents prize for debut features, and the Korean Film Achievement Award.
A-list status is not a ranking, and it is being read as one
FIAPF accreditation is an administrative category with requirements about competition rules, premiere status and jury composition. It is not a judgement about quality and it does not put a festival "above" any other. Berlin, Cannes, Venice, San Sebastian, Karlovy Vary, Locarno and Tokyo all hold it.
What it does confer is exactly the kind of thing in the paragraph above: procedural recognition that other institutions then hang rules on. Busan spent thirty years as the most important festival in Asia without it. It now has the paperwork to match, and the paperwork turns out to have an Oscar attached.
What is still unknown
Whether any committee-rejected film takes the route this year — the mechanism is new and untested. Whether the thirteen competition titles include anything already submitted by its own country, which would make the question moot for that film. And whether other A-list festivals will now be granted the same qualifying power, which the Academy has not addressed.
A festival in a port city that spent three decades being described as Asia's Cannes has been given, in the same season, the classification and a piece of leverage that Cannes has never had. It opens on Monday.