The 26th Busan International Film Festival Kicked off with a Grand Opening

The Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) opened its 26^th edition on 6^th October 2021 at the Busan Cinema Centre in Busan, South Korea. The festival will continue to run over the next few days until 15^th October 2021, and compared to last year, we were treated to an in-person opening ceremony and it shall be the same for the closing ceremony, with both being accompanied by a red carpet event. The opening ceremony took place yesterday on 6^th October, which was streamed live on YouTube, and was kicked off with the South Korean film Heaven: To the Land of Happiness by director Im Sang-soo.

Co-hosted by Park So-dam (Parasite) and Song Joong-ki (Vincenzo), the opening ceremony and the red carpet event was filled with an amazing line-up featuring some of the most popular South Korean artists including Han So-hee, Ahn Bo-hyun, Go Minsi, Sim Eun-woo, Kwon So-hyun, Tang Jun-sang, Choi Hee-seo, Park So-yi, Lee Joo-young, and Kim Yong-ji. 

The red carpet event took place at 6pm KST, before the main event started from 7:10pm KST; the entire opening ceremony was aired live from the Busan International Film Festival YouTube channel, which is linked down below and can be re-watched at any time:

BIFF selected 223 films from 70 different countries for the duration of the film festival, which sounds like an exciting amount for this year compared to the last, which due to the pandemic was on a much smaller scale and was an online event only, rather than an in-person one.

Other special events will also take place alongside this, such as the special talk by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho with the Japanese director Hamaguchi Ryusuke. This specific event takes place at 5pm KST on the BIFF YouTube channel, so keep a look out for that!

With a successful start to the 26^th Busan International Film Festival, we can only hope to continue expecting great things for future events.

To find out more information about the 26^th BIFF, click the link down below and check out the screening schedule from the official website:

https://www.biff.kr/eng/