Same Stage, 31 Years Later

The Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) opens its 31st edition this month, October 6 through 15, with the largest lineup its programmers have put together since 2019: 247 films from 59 countries. BIFF has run every year since 1996, and in that time became Asia's largest film festival and arguably the region's biggest launching pad for new directors. A long list of names now familiar well beyond Korea passed through Busan early in their careers.

I've followed the festival from a distance for years, and what I keep noticing is that a film's relationship with Busan rarely ends with the festival. It wins an award, or doesn't, and then spends years afterward being rediscovered, remade, or recognized again somewhere else. This issue follows three films through that longer life: one that won an award at Busan back in 2010, one getting a new life through this year's live-action remake, and one whose director collected an honor on the same stage months before becoming one of the most decorated filmmakers globally.

Speaking of Busan, it is one of my favorite cities in Korea. It has so much more to offer beyond the festival season, and I highly recommend putting it on your travel wish list at any time of the year.

— Yubin

Bleak Night opens with a father going through his dead son's phone, trying to reconstruct a life he mostly missed. The son, Ki-tae, has died under circumstances the film tries to explain, and the investigation runs backward through his friendships with two other boys, Hee-joon and Dong-yoon, whose falling out may have had something to do with it.

The film doesn't let the three boys off easy, but it also doesn't let the audience pick a villain among them. The bullying, the small cruelties, the way a friend group can turn on one of its own without any single person deciding to be cruel: all of these details are shown plainly, without a verdict attached. The father's search becomes the audience's search: not for who did it, but for what the reason even was.

Lee Je-hoon, in his first major role, delivers a strong performance that reads differently once you know how the film ends. He's since become one of Korea's more reliable and interesting leading men (Signal, Time to Hunt, Taxi Driver), and Bleak Night is the clearest evidence of why directors kept hiring him early.

The film won the New Currents Award at the 15th Busan International Film Festival in 2010, and remains one of the more durable titles to come out of that era of Korean independent cinema. Yoon made it as his film school graduation project. It's a hard watch in places, and it doesn't resolve as cleanly as the father might want.

Stream free on OnDemandKorea (Trailer)

5 Centimeters Per Second (秒速5センチメートル) — Makoto Shinkai (Japan, 2007)

The film tells a single relationship's story in three separate chapters, each one set further apart in time, following it as it slowly falls apart across distance and years, through Shinkai's now-signature style: trains, falling snow, skies that do a lot of the emotional work in place of dialogues. The original 2007 anime is still the version worth watching, even with a live-action adaptation (starring SixTONES' Hokuto Matsumura, scored by Kenshi Yonezu) having had its international premiere at last year's 30th BIFF before opening in Japan. Shinkai made this film years before Your Name turned him into a global name, and it remains his saddest, least forgiving film about how people drift apart.

Stream on Max, Hulu, Roku (Trailer)

It Was Just an Accident (یک تصادف ساده,) — Jafar Panahi (Iran, 2025)

A former political prisoner recognizes his torturer by the sound of his footsteps and his prosthetic leg, years later, by chance. The film is tense and often funny, and it cares more about whether his act of revenge is justified than about making a broader statement on Iranian politics. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2025, and Panahi, attending Busan in person for the 30th edition's Gala Presentation screenings, was honored there as the festival's Asian Filmmaker of the Year. He's now the fourth director ever, and the only one still working, to win the top prize at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin.

Stream on Disney+, Hulu (Trailer)

Ella Langley's "Choosin' Texas" has made news on the Billboard charts recently, extending its run at No.1 of the Hot 100 to the longest ever, surpassing Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" for the all-time record across any genre. The three Asian artists below made their own marks on the Billboard 200 album chart, each one charting without coming out of the K-pop idol pipeline that dominates most conversations about Asian music right now.

Michelle Zauner built her reputation as a writer before most people realized she'd done it as a musician first. Crying in H Mart, her 2021 memoir about her mother's death and her own complicated relationship to being half-Korean, sold well enough to make her as recognizable in bookstores as on festival lineups. For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), her band Japanese Breakfast's fourth album, is the first record she's made since that book made her famous for something other than music.

The album leans more fully into the orchestral arrangements she'd been edging toward on Jubilee, her 2021 breakout album. Whereas that record reached for joy after two earlier albums steeped in grief, this one sits somewhere in ambivalence. It peaked at the modest #46 on the Billboard 200, but Japanese Breakfast was never really a charts act. People tend to follow her for both the music and the writing, which is rare for an artist who does both.

Zauner has built something unusual: a body of work where the music and the prose inform each other without either one feeling like a side project. Crying in H Mart gives the sad songs a specific, lived-in context; the songs give the book's grief a melody. They don’t have to work this way, but together they make her work more interesting and human.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Amen — Rich Brian (Indonesia, 2018)

Rich Brian was 19 and still trying to get rid of the internet-joke persona that made him briefly famous (as Rich Chigga) when he released Amen, his first album under his new name. It debuted at #18 on the Billboard 200, the highest chart position reached at the time by an Asian solo artist, and the production, mostly handled by 88rising affiliates, is sharper and more unique than the mixtape rap that preceded it. "Occupied" and "Attention" still hold up and are worth a listen; the rest is a document of someone trying to establish himself as a serious musician on the global stage.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Gabriel — Keshi (Vietnamese-American, 2022)

Keshi was working as an oncology nurse in Texas when his bedroom R&B recordings started finding an audience online, and he didn't fully commit to music until Gabriel, his debut studio album, reached #16 on the Billboard 200 chart. The record is quieter and more melancholic than most major-label R&B debuts, built around his own falsetto and minimal production, and its closest reference points are late-2010s bedroom pop rather than anything from the recent R&B genre. He's since talked about how the hospital work shaped his patience in the studio, and it quietly shows in the quality of his debut album.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Dayanita Singh met Mona Ahmed on an assignment, photographing Delhi's hijra community for a magazine story in the late 1980s. The friendship that formed lasted more than a decade and produced Myself Mona Ahmed, published by Scalo Books in 2001: a book built from photographs and the actual letters the two women exchanged, rather than a conventional documentary essay.

Mona was born in pre-independence Old Delhi and eventually made her home in a cemetery there, where she lived until her death in 2018. Singh's photographs resist the before-and-after arc that stories about hijra and trans lives are often forced into. There's no narrative of transformation here, no triumphant reveal. Mona appears the way she is: specific, difficult, funny, impossible to summarize in a single identity category.

Early reviews of the book tended to treat Mona's gender as the story's central fact. Later critics, including the scholar Vikramaditya Sahai, have argued that this misses what the book is actually doing: representing a life with the kind of dignity that documentary photography of marginalized subjects often misses, treating the friendship itself, and not just the curious interest in hijra identity. 

Singh has made more celebrated work since, including Museum Bhavan, which won the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year in 2017. But Myself Mona Ahmed remains the best statement of what she does best: photographing someone closely enough and letting the relationship create the artwork.

Follow her work on her website and IG @dayanitasingh

In the first half of 2026, Asian titles accounted for 3.08 billion hours of viewing on Netflix, 62 percent of all non-English viewing hours on the platform worldwide. For 16 of the year's first 26 weeks, an Asian title held the #1 spot on Netflix's global non-English chart. This isn't a niche trend being amplified by an algorithm. It has become a well-known phenomenon.

Korean content did the heaviest lifting, claiming 28 of the 50 titles that charted globally during the half. Teach You a Lesson, a webtoon-based Korean action drama, spent four consecutive weeks at #1 and racked up roughly 499 million hours watched. Can This Love Be Translated?, a Korean rom-com, added another 271 million hours. But Korea wasn't alone: Taskaree: The Smuggler's Web, a Hindi crime thriller, was the only non-Korean #1 title, at 65.3 million hours, and Pursuit of Jade, a 40-episode Chinese period drama, claimed its place as well. Japan placed 11 titles on the chart, India 5, with Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia rounding out the rest.

What's striking isn't any single title's success. It's the consistency: more than half of all the hours spent watching anything that isn't in English, for six straight months, went to Asian content. Whatever algorithm or cultural shift is driving it, audiences outside Asia are quietly making Asian television their default, not their discovery.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com