The Festival

The Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN covers a geographical expanse, stretching from Iran to Central Asia, a region that includes the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, as well as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; Southeast Asia with China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Vietnam; and the Asia-Pacific region with Australia and New Zealand.

As in previous editions, AFFBCN 2025 will feature films from more than twenty countries, highlighting some films as usual, but also screening titles from lesser-known countries. One of the festival’s objectives is to explore this strange or foreign aspect that cinema reveals to us and to stimulate interest in discovery. Hence, the program aims to be inclusive; not so much with the intention of covering more titles each year, but rather to give visibility to both well-known authors who already have a fan base, as well as to lesser-known ones. The aim is to provide opportunities to explore local and global narratives and trajectories, with the aim of reviving cultures that are identity references, whose visibility provides us with essential knowledge of what we consider other, strange, or foreign, in relation to the territory, and to ourselves.

The festival arrives this fall with a program that wants to be as representative as possible of the most recent experimental and independent cinema from the Asian continent, without excluding productions that respond both to the interest of an audience familiar with cinematography from Asia, as well as those who want begin to know what a not-so-new cinema transmits to us, whose diversity responds preferably to the different narratives it exposes. The exoticism that in the West has usually been attributed to these productions has been replaced by the contribution that the latter have made and continue to make to culturally construct an identity inseparable from belonging to the territory.

The festival will bring together around 100 films, grouped into six competition sections: Official, Official Panorama, Discoveries, NETPAC, Special Section, and New Perspectives, among which the various selected titles will be strategically distributed. The juries are composed of those designated for this purpose: directors, film critics, and writers who agree to fulfill this role.