The Mongolian-German feature Zogsool won four prizes at the Busan International Film Festival’s Vision Awards, and two Indian films, the Tamil Selvi and the Punjabi Birds in the Dark, were among the winners.
The 31st Busan International Film Festival has announced the winners of its Busan Vision Awards, and the Mongolian-German feature Zogsool, directed by Sakhya Byamba, won four of them, according to Variety and Deadline headlines. The South Korean film Full Moon, directed by Jeong Jihye, won three. The festival is held in Busan, South Korea, and was founded in 1996, according to a report by ETV Bharat.
The Busan Vision Awards recognise films from Asia and Korea, and the festival also gives audience prizes in several categories, according to the same report. The sources reviewed do not list every award and the amount of each, so only the winners named below are covered.
Two Indian films won prizes. Selvi, a Tamil-language film directed by Sailesh Rathnakumar, won the Hylife Vision Award and the Taipei Film Commission Award, according to ETV Bharat. It stars the National Award-winning actor Anjali Patil as a migrant home-care nurse. The report says it had its world premiere at the festival on 9 October 2026 and was screened to a full house.
Birds in the Dark, a Punjabi-language film directed by Shashank Walia, won the Songwon Vision Audience Award for Asia, which carries a prize of 10 million South Korean won, according to the same report. It is a black-and-white film about gender, caste, class and justice in rural Punjab. The report does not give the exchange rate, and the sum is not converted here.
ETV Bharat also says that the major Asian winners included films from Mongolia, Iran, Kazakhstan and Japan, but the article does not name them in the part reviewed, so those winners are not listed. The Hollywood Reporter has published a full list of the 2026 winners, but the page redirected to a paywall service and could not be read, so Delima News does not repeat the claims in its search summary.
The results show how much of the festival’s attention was on first and second films. The Vision Awards are meant to support emerging filmmakers, and the winners named, Byamba, Jeong, Rathnakumar and Walia, are credited with their films in the reports, although the sources reviewed do not say which of them are first-time directors.
The festival runs in October, a few weeks after Venice and Toronto and in the same period as the London Film Festival, which closes on 18 October. Delima News has reported on the London festival’s competition and its opening film, Elsinore.
The sources reviewed do not give the festival’s dates, the attendance or the jury members, so those details are left out.
For the winning films, a Busan prize is often the beginning of a wider festival run, but the sources reviewed do not say where Zogsool, Full Moon, Selvi or Birds in the Dark will screen next.
Image: The Busan Cinema Center during the 2020 festival (file photo). Photo: 밥풀떼기 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
