Busan Film Festival has revealed its Vision Asia lineup.
Two Indian selections feature.
Shashank Walia's Birds in the Dark and Sailesh Rathnakumar's Selvi are the Indian entries on the freshly revamped section.
Busan Film Festival 2026 has announced its lineup for its Vision-Asia section. India shows up twice, represented by Shashank Walia's Birds In The Dark and Sailesh Rathnakumar’s Selvi.
Birds In The Dark At Busan 2026
Set in rural Punjab, Birds In The Dark is shot in black-and-white and backed by Reema Kaur for Two Black Squares, and by Hansal Mehta and Sahil Saigal for True Story Films. In a statement to THR India, Walia remarked, “Birds in the Dark emerges from the people and returns to them. This film was born from a desire to understand one another through mutual aid, care, and solidarity. It is in these acts that we discover what connects us, what is worth fighting for, and, ultimately, what sustains us; love." Walia has written shot and directed the contemplative drama.
Walia shot Gurvinder Singh's latest, Rehmat, that recently premiered in the Locarno Film Festival's main competition.
Selvi To Premiere At Busan Film Festival 2026
The other Indian pick for Vision Asia is Sailesh Rathnakumar’s debut feature Selvi starring Anjali Patil. According to a synopsis shared with Variety, the Tamil film circles Selvi, a homecare nurse who takes on her best friend Kavitha’s shifts in addition to her own after Kavitha’s sudden collapse. Moving from one house to another caring for the elderly, rarely stopping to rest, Selvi begins to confront the weight of guilt, love and survival as long hours blur the boundaries between care and exhaustion.
It's produced from Patil's Anahat Films. Earlier in the year, Selvi was chosen as a a work-in-progress project for the 24th Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum. "Selvi is about a woman moving through an ordinary day. I wanted the film to move with her, to stay close to her life without explaining it or asking it to mean more than it already does," Rathnakumar said in a statement.
Vision-Asia brings together directors from 10 countries and regions, including Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong, Mongolia, the Philippines, Iran, Kazakhstan,Thailand. The Vision programme grew out of Korean Cinema Today – Vision, expanding last year into a standalone program covering filmmakers across the continent.
The 31st Busan International Film Festival will run Oct. 6-15, 2026.
