AFFBCN 2026

Open Call | Send your Movie

The festival opens the call for the entries of films that could be part of the program of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN 2026, which celebrates its thirteenth edition from October 22nd to November 1st, 2026.

THE FESTIVAL 

The Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN 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. 

As in previous editions, in the AFFBCN 2026 films from more than twenty countries will be presented, including popular cinematography but also titles from less recognized countries. 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 arrives this autumn with a program that aims to be as representative as possible of the most recent experimental and independent cinema form the Asian continent, without excluding 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 The exoticism that has tended to be attributed to these productions in the West has been replaced by the contribution they have made and continue to make to the cultural construction of an identity that is inseparable from belonging to the territory. 

The festival will bring together about a hundred films that will be grouped into the 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.