The festival will bring together around one hundred films, productions that respond both to the interest of an audience familiar with Asian filmmaking and those who wish to begin to know what a not-so-new cinema transmits to us, whose diversity responds preferably to the different narratives that it exhibits. The exoticism that has tended to be attributed to these productions in the West has been replaced by the contribution they have made and continue to make to the cultural construction of an identity that is inseparable from belonging to the territory.

One of the festival’s goals is to explore ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ cinema, as well as to stimulate interest in discovery. Hence, in some cases, the program seeks to be inclusive; not with the intention of covering more titles each year, but to show not only recognized authors who already have supporters, but also lesser-known authors. The proposal consists of offering options for exploring local and global narratives and trajectories, with the aim of rescuing cultures that are identity references, whose visibility provides us essential knowledge of ‘the other’, ‘the stranger’ or ‘foreigner’, in relation to the territory, and to oneself.

The festival maintains its structure of six sections in competition: Official Section, Official Panorama, Discoveries, NETPAC, Special Section and New Perspectives, where the different selected titles will be strategically distributed. The corresponding juries will be formed by directors, film critics and writers designated for this purpose and who agree to fulfil this role.

It covers a very wide geographical area, ranging from Iran and Central Asia, a region that includes the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, in addition to Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, also covering Southeast Asia with China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the Asia Pacific with Australia and New Zealand.

The Asian Film Festival Barcelona is supported by the Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals (ICEC -Generalitat de Catalunya), Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB-Ajuntament de Barcelona), Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, Brussels, (HKETO), Fundació Institut Confuci de Barcelona (FICB), the Embassy of Australia and Japan Foundation, among others.