Busan 2026: Majidi's 'Midday Meal' Takes Top Prize at First 'A'-List Edition

Majid Majidi's Midday Meal, an Iranian drama about a teacher fighting to keep a school open, won best film at the 2026 Busan International Film Festival. The jury, headed by Zhang Yimou, handed it the prize in a year when BIFF was classified as an "A" list festival for the first time — making Midday Meal eligible for Academy Award shortlisting.

The numbers were big: more than 275,000 visitors, 315 films screened, 94 of them world premieres. Guests included Alfonso Cuarón, Michelle Yeoh, Koreeda Hirokazu, Ann Hui and Fan Bingbing.

Who else won in Busan?

Zhou Xun, the legendary Chinese star, won best actor for The First Taste of Loneliness, which also took an Artistic Contribution prize. Sailesh Rathnakumar's Selvi, screened in the Vision section, picked up two awards: Hylife Vision and Taipei Film Commission.

The long tail of Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light hangs over Selvi, a close-up account of a healthcare worker's unraveling. Producer Anjali Patil stars in the title role: a health practitioner forced into double and triple shifts to protect her suicidal sister.

Rathnakumar follows Selvi through a tough, unforgiving city — overloaded buses, trains, scooters — to clients who need constant, uncomfortable attention (here's how you clean a tracheotomy tube). She lives in a hostel with no privacy and usually no running water, and must send money home to a mother who constantly criticizes her.

The film can be a tough slog. Patil gives a determined and appealing performance, but Rathnakumar has little to say about the healthcare crisis beyond the system being broken — a worldwide problem that needs a strong script, and instead the story devolves into soap-opera melodrama involving unwanted pregnancies and cheating lovers.

What does the Filipino debut 'Ria' deliver?

Arvin Belarmino's feature debut Ria sits at the opposite end of the spectrum: a defiantly provocative tour through a Filipino underworld of rappers, bikers, squatters and scavengers. It opens with a blistering punk tirade — "Burn the state, crush the state, serve it on a plate" — delivered at full throttle by Nour Hooshmand, the Filipino–Iranian actor (also in Filipiñana) whose kohl-ringed eyes project equal parts hostility and despair.

Ria lives in a condemned tenement targeted by a realtor who hires goons, with water and electricity shut down and arson burning the commune headquarters. She works as a hotel chambermaid, stealing liquor and toiletries, her paycheck going to insulin for her adoptive mother Olga — who still faces an amputation nobody can afford. A possible way out, secret porn productions arranged through the hospital, collapses when her would-be boss says he only wants performers. Ria staring out at the city at night, head in her hands, is heartbreaking in its simplicity.

Belarmino's style is loud and in-your-face: nothing is sacred, anything can be mocked. It slips into sentimentality at the worst moments, redeemed by musical passages and Hooshmand's expert performance. Working with a tiny budget, he stages impressively large-scale street riots — punks firebombing police vans, showering riot cops with bodily fluids — and delivers an uncompromising ending. He appeared in person at the Vision-section world premiere, engaging and outgoing despite a detached retina that left him in a padded eyepatch.

Is 'Earbug' the DIY find of the year?

Kim Hyomi's feature-directing debut Earbug, another Vision world premiere, is deliberately low-res animation about twenty-something artists on the cusp of failure. Compared to Disney output, it's a visual mess: frames shimmer like a wavering internet signal, hair doesn't move, and at times Hyomi just substitutes film footage for drawing.

Kim Jeong-yeon wants to write; her painter flatmate Kim Na-jeong mocks her attempts at writing about love. Judges tear Jeong-yeon's novel apart — too impersonal, needs a more active protagonist — while her suicidal father texts, and Na-jeong's affair with a married curator for a gallery show ends the friendship.

The film wanders into offbeat territory: an alien searching for absolute love takes the form of an earwig, a severed ear becomes a giant UFO possibly spreading a pneumonia virus. The story is scattered, the animation primitive, yet Earbug captures the repeated failures young artists face — and their admirable perseverance. Supported in part by the Korean Academy of Film Arts, Hyomi, like Rathnakumar and Belarmino, is a talent still in development. That, more than the prizes, is what Busan's Vision section exists to find.