Busan International Film Festival closes… Iranian film 'Bread and Books' won grand prize in competition category

(Busan = Yonhap News) Reporter Youngjae Lee = Asia's largest film festival, the 31st Busan International Film Festival, ended on the 15th.

Iranian director Majid Majidi's 'Bread and Books' won the grand prize at the 'Busan Awards' in the competitive category, which was held for the second time this year.

This evening, the closing ceremony of the Busan International Film Festival was held at the Busan Cinema Center in Haeundae-gu, Busan.

At the closing ceremony, which was hosted solely by actor Im Si-wan, the results of the competition category were announced.

The grand prize for the Busan Award, given to the best work, went to 'Bread and Books' by director Majid Majidi, who is famous in Korea for his masterpiece 'Children of Heaven'.

Director Majidi, who received the award from Chinese director Zhang Lu of last year's Busan Award grand prize winner 'Twilight of Luomu', mentioned the reality of Iran at war in his acceptance speech and said, "I hope a world without war will come."

“I give this honor to the Iranian people,” he said. “They are still resisting oppression.”

Director Majidi said, “I lost my mother a few months before filming this film,” adding, “The main character of my film is my mother.”

The winning films of the Busan Awards are eligible to be submitted to the American Academy Awards for International Feature Film.

In the competition section of this film festival, 13 films from various Asian countries, including Korea, were invited to compete.

Chinese master director Zhang Yimou served as the chairman of the jury. Director Jang said of 'Bread and Books', "It is an excellent work that the judges unanimously selected," and "It is also the ideal film I had in mind."

The Best Director at the Busan Awards went to Lee Yun-chan (Taiwan) for 'To Be Ordinary', while the Best Actor awards went to Zhou Xun (China) for 'The Loneliness I Met for the First Time' and Kashun Himeno (Japan) for 'Satoko Always'. The Special Jury Award went to Eddie Kahyono (Indonesia), director of ‘My Mother’.

The Busan International Film Festival introduced a competitive section for the first time last year.

As the competition category enters its second year, the film industry's opinion is that the standard of entries has also improved.

This year's Busan International Film Festival opened on the 6th and ran for 10 days in Busan.

315 films were screened in 8 theaters, and the number of moviegoers exceeded 200,000 for the first time in 11 years since 2015.