Busan’s Asian Cinema Fund tilts toward documentary, handing 7 of 12 grants to nonfiction

Of the three things a film fund can underwrite — a script, a finished film, or the long uncertain middle where documentaries get made — Busan has just spent most of its 2026 budget on the last. The Asian Cinema Fund, the development arm wired into the Busan International Film Festival’s industry market, named 12 recipients this week, and seven of them are documentaries. In a region where nonfiction rarely earns a theatrical window, that allocation reads less like charity than conviction — a wager that the documentary is where Asia’s most urgent stories are still being told.

The 12 projects were drawn from 798 submissions, as Variety first reported, across three streams: three script-development grants, two post-production grants, and seven from the Asian Network of Documentary fund. The script awards went to Payal Sethi’s Germany-India refugee drama ‘Babak,’ Mehrnoush Alia’s Iran-U.S. grief story ‘Bon Voyage,’ and Aditya Ahmad’s Sulawesi-set ‘Goldfish’ — each pairing a cash grant with a slot at next year’s Asian Project Market, the table where Busan turns a logline into financing.

It is the documentary list that maps the festival’s instincts most plainly. Alyx Ayn Arumpac’s ‘Tongues of Fire’ returns to the Philippines’ fights over historical accountability; Jude Hwirin Kang’s ‘Pellong Pellong’ revisits the memory of the Jeju 4·3 uprising; Jung Sueun’s ‘When Words Return’ reaches into the histories of wartime forced mobilization. These are not safe commercial bets — they are precisely the films festivals exist to back when no broadcaster will.

Five of the twelve are international co-productions, the structure that increasingly keeps mid-budget Asian auteur cinema solvent. Ahmad came up through Busan’s own Asian Film Academy in 2014, the fund quietly harvesting talent it planted a decade earlier. The two post-production grants, both for Korean features — Shin Dongmin’s ‘Not for You’ and Kim Miyoung’s ‘Some Detective’ — arrive as in-kind support: color grading, sound mixing, subtitling and DCP work, the unglamorous finishing costs that strand first-time directors.

Both Korean post-production titles are set to premiere later this year at the 31st Busan International Film Festival, which runs October 6–15, 2026, with the Asian Contents & Film Market convening October 10–13.

Out of 798 hopefuls, twelve leave with money — and seven will spend it on the genre that almost never pays it back. Busan, for now, is still counting that as the whole point.

Tags: documentary, Asian Cinema Fund, Asian Network of Documentary, Busan International Film Festival, production-support