The 2024 ASEAN Film Festival will take place from today to Sunday, August 25, offering free screenings of 10 films from across Southeast Asia at the Busan Cinema Center.

This event commemorates two significant diplomatic anniversaries: the 75th anniversary of Korea-Philippines relations and the 40th anniversary of Korea-Brunei relations.

In addition to films from the Philippines and Brunei, the festival will also showcase works from Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, including several films that have yet to be released in Korea.

The festival’s lineup features diverse genres and stories, including award-winning films like Waiting for Sunset (Philippines), which won the Best Film Award at the 2018 Cinemalaya Film Festival and the Audience Award at the 2019 Bujol Film Festival in France. Other highlights include Killing John Denver (Philippines), a social drama about a rural boy grappling with online violence; RINA 2 (Brunei), a story about two young men searching for love; The Third Wife (Vietnam), a critically acclaimed film about a young girl’s struggle for identity in a rural Vietnamese village; and Love is Like a Cat (Korea, Thailand), a co-production that explores the unlikely friendship between a Thai star and a Korean dog kindergarten director.

The festival will also include Oasis of Now (Malaysia, Singapore, France), which tells the poignant story of an undocumented foreign woman in Malaysia, and Solids by the Seashore (Thailand), the debut film by Thai director Pattiphan Boontarik, winner of the New Currents Award at last year’s Busan International Film Festival.

Co-hosted by the Busan Cinema Center and the ASEAN Culture House, operated by the Korea Foundation, the festival will take place at the Cinematheque Hall. The opening ceremony will be held at 6:30 p.m. tonight, followed by a screening of the opening film Waiting for Sunset.

To deepen audience engagement, special lectures on ASEAN cinema will be offered after the screenings at 12:40 p.m. on Saturday, August 24, and Sunday, August 25.

For more details on the films and screening schedules, visit the Film Archive website at www.dureraum.org.

Fleet Chinhae

USAG Daegu