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Busan International Film Festival 2025: Follow the Money
If On a Winter's Night The first conversation I had in Busan was with a Malaysia-based genre film buyer who told me about the recent challenges of dealing with his adopted country’s famously rigid censor board while clearing promotional materials for a new Bollywood film, which he described as a less-violent John Wick. The poster showed the lead actor holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette; unsurprisingly, the board nixed both elements and rejected the compromise of erasing them while leaving smoke still trailing out of the star’s mouth. In the end, the buyer was provided with an image of the hero on a motorcycle with his love interest, a misleading visual he declined to convert into a bait-and-switch display standee. This conversation was totally unrelated to my little pocket of the film world and therefore refreshing and educational, like many of the exchanges I overheard between members of the genre space attending the Busan International Film Festival for its sprawling Asian Project Market (APM) component. More power to them: horror seems to be one of the very, very few spaces of the film world where all the money isn’t collapsing out at precipitous rates, and I both admire and envy their clarity of purpose.
But the first good film I saw at the festival brought me back with a bump to my familiar little niche: the impoverished arthouse world! (Come on in, the water’s lukewarm and filthy.) Made in part with post-production funds from the festival’s Asian Cinema Fund, Sanju Surendran’s If On a Winter’s Night tracks the downward economic spiral of a creative class couple freshly relocated to to New Delhi. Abhi (Roshan Abdul Rahoof) sketches portraits and is preparing for a show but has no money until that happens; Sarah (Bhanu Priyamvada) works for an unspecified film festival (the festival’s offices simply bear the words “International Film Festival” without localized specificity, which is both funny and helps avoid a lawsuit) that doesn’t pay enough for her administrative labors. The couple economize by living in an apartment complex where their intrusive landlady is constantly on their ass for not speaking Hindi, keeping the lights on after hours or having guests over. Both lead performers convincingly embody the lived-in quicksilver intimacy of an infatuated couple being slowly worn down, and watching the light slowly fade from their eyes is fairly devastating. One subtext, which the subtitles make clear by always clearly indicating which language is being spoken, is that the couple are non-Hindus relocated to a city in the grip of prime minister Narendra Modi’s xenophobic and nationalistic Hindutva ideology; to hear Hindi spoken is not just alienating but signals a potential threat to their physical safety, a hostility which begins just outside their doorstep. People need space (mental and physical), scope (to dream of progress towards better things) and support (from their workplace and surrounding society): what happens when none of the three are available?
As an economic vise tightens around the couple, the film made me cover my eyes in horror—“underpaid creative class” is something I know all about. There’s a current surplus of movies-about-making-movies, but few about the laborers keeping the festival economy moving which showcases all of these, and I suspect that’s part of why the movie got to me. Unlike works that urge empathy for clearly dispossessed delivery workers (a burgeoning sub-genre in recent works like Lucky Lu and Souleymane’s Story) and those otherwise at the bottom of the gig economy ladder (Sorry We Missed You) who clearly have neither the time nor resources to go a festival screening, Winter’s Night depicts people in my professional/economic lane doing their best to hang on within a realm where whatever financing remains has been redirected in every direction other than to them. Mostly working with medium shots punctuated by the odd extreme close-up, Surendran cuts remarkably fast between frames constrained by the apartment’s cramped layout, a quick pace suggesting the constant destablization of not having enough money.
Chen Jianhang’s fellow ACF post-production awardee The River That Holds Our Hands was made, at least at the time of its complete first cut, for $63,747, which would barely seem to cover just the raw travel expenses involved—I’m impressed! The movie is what we’d call a “promising first feature,” full of slow cinema compositional skill but a little low on the ideas necessary to get to even 85 minutes. A barely-there plot follows a doc filmmaker of Teochow origins who visits Saigon to trace his displaced grandmother’s past; he’s so eager to learn her story that at one point he breaks out the mic to record her while driving. The movie’s big gimmick is so simple and successful that I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before: in multiple scenes, we get both the muffled rough “documentary” sound of the single mic the filmmaker’s carrying and the fuller, nicely sculpted full mix tied to the fictional camera’s POV—sometimes one flowing into the other, sometimes both at once (credit for the outstanding work in making all this flow to Wuchao Yu). There’s a lot of diasporic longing going around, and this film’s thematic thrust, while ethnically very specific, is fairly generic; still, if I were a programmer scouting new talent I’d keep an eye out for Chen’s second film.
In the more overstuffed realm of movies-about-making-narrative-movies, Shahram Mokri’s Black Rabbit, White Rabbit immediately cites Chekov’s gun as its epigraph then, in its first very long shot, proceeds to set it off without delay. The complicated plot moves outwards from this scene from a film being made within this film—though it turns out there are actually two of these in production, being simultaneously overseen by the same producer on the same backlot. One of Rabbit’s meta-jokes is that he doesn’t understand the need for all these master shots: “I mean, I get it, but will the audience?” he asks. This, of course, is executive-speak for “I don’t get it and think all audiences are as dumb as I am.” The other movie he’s supervising, a remake of a period biopic, is building to an assassination scene, and the on-set armorer worries about not having been given access to inspect the prop gun first. His concerns are dismissed with blithe indifference—“We just need a prop gun to go off once. As long as no one dies, we’re good”—and viewers sit back and wait to see the inevitable results of such cost-cutting taking root; inevitably and refreshingly, the dread specter of Alec Baldwin is explicitly cited.
For about an hour, Black Rabbit is great fun, but unfortunately Mokri’s film is 138 minutes long. To be fair, it does meaningfully change over that time: the first two shots alone are a solid 35 minutes, but as Black Rabbit proceeds the cutting accelerated enough that I stopped counting the shots, while Peyman Yazdanian’s score fills out from chintzy keyboard to something that at least sounds more like a full orchestra. But as the shots grow shorter, the movie grew less compelling—I enjoy a good Steadicam piece of elaborate choreography, and some of the early the on-set walkarounds approach the delirium of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure’s studio set finale delirium, but Mokri is more interested in game-playing and systematically removing the walls between the fictional movies and his constructed reality, repeating lines between these multiple iterations over and over again, redirecting what we think’s happening with the tedious unflappability of David Mamet dropping 15 twists in a row.
Viewing-wise, my festival hit rock bottom with Gloaming in Luomu, inexplicably awarded Best Film in the fest’s newly created Competition slate, consolidated from two previous sections with the goal of providing a unified spotlight for pan-Asian filmmaking. Zhang Lu has been making features at a regular clip since 2003, the only one of which I’ve seen is 2023’s totally solid The Shadowless Tower, a kind of Yi Yi cover band offering I am definitely in the market for. By contrast, I have no idea what even the best possible version of Gloaming is supposed to be: slow-burn catharsis? Droll comedy? The film alternately feints at both while observing Bai (Baihe Bai), who arrives for an open-ended stay in a small Chinese town that’s the last known place her enigmatic ex-boyfriend lived. Bai is, minus her hotel proprietor’s sole visible employee and boyfriend Huang, the only person in town who doesn’t drink; everyone else seems on a mission to get continuously shitfaced and cajole her into a round. But the movie is basically never funny, nor is it especially pregnant with longing for a missing partner; it’s just inert. Towards the end, as Bai finally gets in a car and heads towards a literal/metaphorical destination to resolve her quest, she keeps asking how many kilometers remain. “Five, four, three”—as the are-we-there-yet? countdown kept going, it felt like the movie was mocking my own strong desire for it to end.
Fresh from its Venice premiere, for 40 minutes Jaume Claret Muxart’s debut feature Strange River is a fine but familiar coming-of-age saga rooted in a flawlessly naturalistic Catalan family unit on a financially straitened summer vacation biking alongside the Danube through Germany. 20 years ago, this movie would probably have been about a queer teen angsting about coming out; in a sign of meaningful social change within my lifetime, 16-year-old Dídac (Jan Monter) already has his loving family’s full and uncompromising support. The film is, nonetheless, on pretty standard ground until it takes a few unexpected turns. When the family visit a German university campus and locate a piano, dad Albert (Jordi Oriol) sits down to play, then is joined by Dídac and actress mom Monika (Nausicaa Bonnín); all three are clearly playing for real. To get one actor who can perform on-screen for real is fortunate; to cast three is ridiculously blessed.
River really starts to change when Monika momentarily achieves personhood outside of the family unit. Albert has led his family to gawk at a house distinguished for architectural reasons, and the actress who lives there is recognized by Monika, who switches from Catalan to first German, then French, to bond over their shared profession. Suddenly Monika’s no longer a mother but a trilingual world citizen and fellow professional reciter of Hölderlin’s The Death of Empedocles; as her family retreats, the hints of an erotic frisson between the two women emerge, one that’s less sexual than simply the sexiness of being recognized as a whole person whose more impressive qualities are often overlooked. That’s a prelude for Dídac splitting from both his family and the narrative entirely, running away with a young German teen (Francesco Wenz) on a boat cruise down the Danube towards his own hopeful erotic realization. As the initial structure disappears entirely, both he and the narrative are liberated to pursue unexpected paths in a first feature that leaves more of an impression than it initially promises.
