The 10th Busan Intercity Film Festival raises its curtain on Aug. 28, 2026. It is a small festival, three days through the 30th, held only at two venues in the Busan Cinema Center, the Cinematheque and the Mousai Theater. The Busan Independent Film Association hosts and organizes it and the City of Busan sponsors it, and 21 partner cities at home and abroad have put their names down. This is the tenth edition.
The word intercity means between one city and another. Almost everything this festival has done over ten years is contained in that single word. The association says its aim has been to introduce the world's creative cities of film and Busan's filmmakers to one another.
This year's slogan is understood to be "Film People City." Film, people, city. The order is telling. It is an arrangement in which film goes first, the people who made the film follow, and the city those people have lived comes last.
A scale of 21 cities was not built overnight. The participating cities are places with which the association has built relationships over time, one film and one person at a time. With some cities it began with a screening, and with others it was likely sustained by people traveling back and forth. The list of cities and the breakdown between domestic and overseas were not included in the information released this time.
By size alone it may look modest. Two screening rooms, three days. Set against the big festival that stirs all of Busan for ten days, all the more so.
But the unit this festival deals in is the total of what cities have actually exchanged with one another. It is not captured in audience numbers.
The seats in the Cinematheque are red and thick. When the screening ends and the lights come on, that red returns all at once, and the image that has just crossed over from another city becomes one screen with the city where the viewer is sitting now. The Mousai Theater is smaller, so the distance between the screen and the audience is short. It is a room of a size where a voice reaches as it is.
The tension between preservation and use always runs subtly through events like this. Those who would keep ten years of accumulated relationships as they are and those who would put those relationships to work as an asset of Busan's film industry have different destinations. The very form in which sponsorship and hosting are divided is close to a compromise between those two forces. The association gains the grammar of exchange, the city the worth of its name.
The timing is no coincidence either. The 31st Busan International Film Festival will use the same Busan Cinema Center as its main venue for ten days from Oct. 6 to 15. The executive committee's full lineup of invited films is released on Sept. 1.
Six weeks before the big festival arrives, a far quieter one opens in the same building. It has come through ten years in this order from the start.
If Busan's film ecosystem is seen as a single tree, the one in October is closer to the fruit and this one in August is closer to the roots. A tree cannot be understood from the fruit alone. Relationships with twenty-one cities are not made by a ten-day festival, and only barely take shape after three days are repeated ten times.
From Aug. 28 to 30, screenings continue in two theaters under that big roof in Centum City, Haeundae. Details on how to attend and on side events can be checked through the association's announcements. It is the kind of festival for which it is enough to sit on a late-summer evening facing a screen where the name of an unfamiliar city passes by in the subtitles.
