Busan Never Had to Discover India

Every festival in this series so far has, in one way or another, been about the West deciding to pay attention. Cannes deciding to let India back into Competition. Locarno deciding an Assamese farmer's story deserved its top prize. Nantes deciding, earlier than almost anyone, that Kerala and Bengal were worth a look. There's always a gatekeeper in these stories, someone on the other side of a velvet rope making a call.

Busan doesn't really have that structure, and it's worth being precise about why. When the festival launched in 1996 - the first international film festival Korea had ever hosted - its entire premise was Asian cinema platforming Asian cinema. India wasn't an exotic import waiting to be let in. It was one of the countries the festival existed for, by definition, alongside Korea, Japan, China, Iran, and everywhere else east of the gatekeepers this series has spent five pieces writing about. That changes the shape of the story. There's no thirty-year gap to explain here, no single rescued moment. There's a steady, unglamorous, ongoing presence in the sections built specifically for filmmakers nobody has heard of yet.

New Currents: Built for This

Busan's signature competition, New Currents, exists for first or second features by up-and-coming Asian directors - which means, structurally, it's the section most likely to catch Indian filmmakers before anyone else does. And it has, repeatedly, if quietly.

In 2019, Kislay Kislay's Just Like That took a Special Mention in New Currents, while Pradip Kurbah's Market - a Khasi-language film from Meghalaya, made by one of the very few filmmakers working in that language at all - won the Kim Jiseok Award, the festival's honor for more established Asian directors with at least three features behind them. It's a small but telling detail: Busan finding a Khasi film worth rewarding in the same decade Locarno was still building its own relationship with Northeast Indian cinema, on the opposite side of the world, without either festival particularly coordinating with the other.

Three years later, in 2022, Jaishankar Aryar's Shivamma won the New Currents Award outright - the top prize in the section, shared that year with a South Korean debut. It's worth noting that Shivamma wasn't only having a moment at Busan. The same film picked up the Young Jury Award at Nantes' Festival des 3 Continents that same year, a coincidence this series is well positioned to notice precisely because it's been tracking both festivals separately. One small Indian film, two festivals on opposite sides of the world, the same twelve months.

Rima Das's Round Trip

If one filmmaker's arc captures what Busan actually does for Indian cinema, it's Rima Das's. Her 2017 debut, Village Rockstars, premiered at Toronto, not Busan - a self-taught, one-woman-crew film about a girl in an Assamese village who wants a guitar, shot on a single borrowed lens, that went on to become India's Oscar submission that year. Busan wasn't part of that story yet.

Seven years later, it was. Village Rockstars 2 had its world premiere at Busan in 2024 - the only Indian feature in that year's Kim Jiseok Competition - and won the award. The film picks up its protagonist, Dhunu, as a teenager now, wrestling with the distance between the guitar-shaped dream of the first film and the harder shape of actual adulthood. Das herself has said the ending of the original stayed with her for years before she knew what the sequel would be. What Busan gave that arc wasn't a discovery - Das had already been discovered, by Toronto, years earlier. What it gave was a homecoming for a specific film, on a stage built for exactly the kind of unglamorous, character-driven Asian cinema Das makes.

From Being Judged to Judging

The clearest sign that Busan's relationship with Indian cinema runs differently than the other festivals in this series isn't a prize at all. It's who's been sitting on the other side of the table.

In 2024, actor Kani Kusruti - fresh off a year that included All We Imagine as Light's Grand Prix at Cannes - served on the New Currents jury, helping decide which young Asian filmmakers would win the award Indian directors have themselves been competing for. In 2025, when Busan launched its first-ever official competition after twenty-nine years as a non-competitive festival, Nandita Das was one of seven jurors chosen to hand out the inaugural Busan Award - the festival's new top prize, still too young to have any winners to look back on yet, Indian or otherwise.

That's not a small distinction. Every other festival in this series has, at some point, been a room India was trying to get into. By 2025, at Busan, India had people in the room deciding who else got in.

What TalkiesDB Tracks

Busan doesn't have a thirty-year silence to explain, or a single rescued film to build a whole piece around. What it has instead is something harder to see without a database built to see it: a Khasi film winning quietly in the same years Locarno was doing similar work an ocean away, a small film picking up prizes at Busan and Nantes in the same season without either festival's coverage mentioning the other, a filmmaker's seven-year arc from Toronto debutante to Busan homecoming queen. TalkiesDB's Busan page holds all of it, cross-referenced against the same directors and films tracked everywhere else in this series - because the most interesting thing about Busan's relationship with Indian cinema might not be any single prize, but how often it quietly overlaps with everyone else's.