The 31st Busan International Film Festival runs for ten days, from Tuesday, Oct. 6, to Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026. The main venue is the Busan Cinema Center, and the organizing committee will announce the full lineup of invited films on Sept. 1. Before and after those ten days, art, documentaries and films made by residents all converge on the city.
The roof of the Busan Cinema Center is a steel canopy more than a hundred meters long. At night the lights set into its underside flow like waves, and people standing in the plaza tilt their heads back and watch that light pass.
More than 2.42 million foreign tourists visited Busan in the first half of this year, the highest figure on record. That count of 2.42 million does not translate directly into theater seats. Still, it gives a sense of the size of the crowds the city has to handle over one season.
In the same season, the 2026 Busan Biennale has taken "Dissonant Chorus" as its slogan. Art events and exhibitions open across Busan to coincide with it, and people call this current the "sea of art." In Busan this fall, the film festival, the biennale and small film events each run on their own schedule.
From Sept. 3 to 7, over five days, the 5th Only One Earth Film Festival takes place at the Busan Cinema Center. It is a film event on the theme of the climate crisis that began in Busan in 2022, and this year's theme is "Cooling the Earth With Our Own Hands." The opening film is director Jin Jae-woon's "Song of the Trees."
"Song of the Trees" follows work carried out in the jungles of Nicaragua in Central America with the aim of returning oxygen to the earth. Its scale is likened to about 3,000 soccer fields.
The number of entries has grown as well. It rose by 461 films from the previous year, and entries came from 148 countries. A film event that started five years ago as a small attempt in Busan is now drawing cameras from more than a hundred countries.
The festivities do not stay only in the big downtown theaters. The Yangsan City Regional Revitalization Support Center said it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Busan International Film Festival on Aug. 19. The two will jointly run the 2026 BIFF "Anyone Can Make a Film" project, in which local residents plan, shoot and screen films themselves. It is an experiment in which people who used to sit in the audience cross over behind the camera.
There is also a plan to use the grounds of closed schools, the seaside and the space under the stars as screening venues. Where and when the screenings will be held has yet to be decided.
Turning a closed school into a theater is a way of putting an empty building back to use, and at the same time it can become a way of covering up why that building was emptied. It is natural for festivals to increase in a city where tourists have increased, but how those added festivals change the daily life of the people who live there is a separate story. The project in which Yangsan residents make films with their own hands sits between those two paths.
On Sept. 1 the festival's list of invited films will be released. Before that, on the evening of Sept. 3, a documentary shot in the Nicaraguan jungle screens at the Busan Cinema Center. Watching the lights of the steel roof from the plaza requires no ticket.
