Iranian director Majid Majidi’s Midday Meal won the best film prize at the Busan International Film Festival Thursday, giving the acclaimed drama about a teacher struggling to feed his pupils a route into the Oscars’ best international feature race.
Busan’s seven-member jury, led by Chinese filmmaking legend Zhang Yimou, said its decision was unanimous. Buzz around Majidi’s movie had been building on the ground in Busan all week, with many predicting — correctly — that it would take home the top prize.
Accepting the honor at the Busan Cinema Center, Majidi dedicated his victory to the people of Iran and used portions of his speech to condemn the civilian toll of the U.S.-led war on his country.
“I would like to dedicate this prize to the brave heroes of Iran — the people of Iran, who have stood firm through all these years and are still resisting oppression,” he said.
“On the very first day of this war in Iran, a school in Minab was hit, and 120 innocent students were killed. Even now, some of the bodies have not been found,” he later added. “What crime have our people committed? There is nothing except that our people want to be independent. They will stand firm until the end.”
He concluded: “I wish for a world where there is no more war, full of peace, love and brotherhood. I’m praying for that future.”
Midday Meal dazzled critics in Busan with its powerful, parable-like storytelling and assured visual style. The film follows Davoud Soulan (Mohammad Rahimi), a contract teacher in a remote village in southeastern Iran whose hopes of securing a permanent government job are jeopardized when a wealthy benefactor dies and the free lunches that keep his impoverished pupils coming to school disappear. Determined to save both his school and his future, Soulan resorts to increasingly desperate measures, including dangerous cross-border fuel smuggling, as his natural decency comes into conflict with his modest ambitions.
The film continues Majidi’s longstanding thematic preoccupation with the moral pressures faced by people on society’s margins, as seen in earlier festival-winning works like The Color of Paradise (1999) and Baran (2001). For Midday Meal, he assembled an entirely nonprofessional cast through street casting in the region, setting their performances against the stark, otherworldly landscape of Iran’s so-called Martian Mountains.
Earlier in the festival, Majidi spoke at length at a press conference about how he had nearly declined the invitation to travel to South Korea because he felt depressed and exhausted by the dire situation at home. He ultimately decided that the trip would allow him and his film to convey “some kind of small message from my people to the people of other nations and other places.”
Majidi’s victory on Thursday night also gives Midday Meal an instantaneous jolt of Oscars buzz. The Busan festival introduced its main competition just last year, bringing its awards structure closer to those of Europe’s leading cinema events. Under rules introduced by the Film Academy, Busan’s best film winner can be submitted for international feature consideration without being selected by its country’s Oscar committee (Busan joins Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto on the Academy’s list of festivals whose designated awards offer such consideration).
Iran has already chosen Babak Khajehpasha’s Land of Angels, a drama about children enduring the war in Gaza, as its official submission for the 99th Academy Awards. But Midday Meal now has an open, alternate route to the race.
Majidi previously made Oscar history with Children of Heaven (1997), which became the first Iranian film nominated in the international category, then known as best foreign-language film.
Among the other main competition winners, Indonesian director Eddie Cahyono received the special jury prize for Ibuku. The film stars veteran screen actress Christine Hakim as a widow whose late husband’s gambling debts force her to arrange a marriage for her only daughter, setting in motion an anguished mother-daughter drama.
Taiwan’s Lee Yun Chan won best director for To Be Ordinary, about a family whose strained relationships are tested by a devastating accident. The award marks a return to the Busan spotlight for Lee, whose debut feature, The Shoe Fairy, screened in the festival’s New Currents section in 2005.
The two best actor awards went to Chinese star Zhou Xun and Japanese newcomer Kashun Himeno. Zhou was recognized for Gu You’s The First Taste of Loneliness, which follows three generations of women navigating grief after the death of the family’s patriarch. The film also earned the artistic contribution award for Li Danfeng’s sound work. Himeno won for her screen debut in Shuichi Okita’s Satoko Always. She plays the youngest of three women who share a name but occupy different stages of life, each turning to writing to make sense of her experiences.
India’s Shashank Walia earlier won the New Currents Award for Birds in the Dark, a black-and-white Punjabi-language drama exploring caste, labor and love in rural Punjab. The film, backed by filmmaker Hansal Mehta, had already collected the Songwon Vision Audience Award for an Asian title the previous evening. And a New Currents special mention went to South Korean director Lim Hayeon’s debut feature Beach Fictions, about a young woman whose escape to a seaside town brings enigmatic encounters with a novelist, a magician and a fortune teller.
Zhang’s jury assessed 13 competition titles. Joining him on the panel were Chinese director Bi Gan, Korean actress Moon Choi, Japanese filmmaker Kei Ishikawa, Korean director July Jung, Vietnamese producer Tran Thi Bich Ngoc and Kazakh actress Samal Yeslyamova.
Busan organizers reported total attendance at the festival of more than 200,000 moviegoers this year, the event’s biggest crowd since 2015. Other programs and special events drew an additional 77,000 attendees, they said. The festival linked the growth to changes in its opening schedule and an expanded screening program. The accompanying Asian Contents & Film Market, held Oct. 10-13, attracted 30,484 participants and 339 companies from 32 countries.
In other starry moments, BIFF’s 31st edition, which ran Oct. 6-15, welcomed Alfonso Cuarón on his first visit to South Korea, alongside guests including Charlotte Gainsbourg, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fan Bingbing, Hirokazu Koreeda, Lee Chang-dong, Na Hong-jin, Lav Diaz and anime veteran Rintaro. Michelle Yeoh received the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award at the opening ceremony, while Hong Kong director Ann Hui accepted the Camellia Award.
The full list of this year’s BIFF award winners follows.
Best film: Midday Meal — Majid Majidi
Special jury prize: Ibuku — Eddie Cahyono
Best director: Lee Yun Chan — To Be Ordinary
Best actor: Zhou Xun — The First Taste of Loneliness
Best actor: Kashun Himeno — Satoko Always
Artistic contribution: Li Danfeng, sound — The First Taste of Loneliness
New Currents
New Currents Award: Birds in the Dark — Shashank Walia
Special mention: Beach Fictions — Lim Hayeon