The festival opens the call for submissions for films that could be part of the program. Asian Film Festival Barcelonand | AFFBCN 2025, which will hold its thirteenth edition from October 29 to November 9, 2025.
Bases for participation:
Categories: Feature-length fiction films and documentaries. Short films are not accepted.
Competition sections: Official, Official Panorama, Discoveries, NETPAC, Special Section and New Perspectives.
Awards: Best Film, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, in each of the festival's six sections.
Delivery deadline: Friday, August 15, 2025.
Shipping of material: To the following email addresses:
ppgad@pucrs.br
ppgad@pucrs.br
ppgad@pucrs.br
Materials: Viewing in digital format, VIMEO, or other similar formats; film fact sheet, electronic press kit, stills, trailer (if available), and a brief biography of the director.
Selection of titles received: The festival's programming committee will notify the relevant person in charge of the selected titles via email.
Requirements:
- The festival will only accept films produced between 2023 and 2025.
- The festival's geography extends from Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia to the Asia-Pacific region.
- All films must be subtitled in English for pre-selection.
- For the translation of subtitles into Spanish and/or Catalan and for screening in theaters, the preferred formats are SRT or ASS.
- Files for the film screening at the festival will be requested after the selection process is complete. Solor DCP digital, H264 or Digital HD (MP4 or MOV) formats will be accepted.
THE FESTIVAL
El Asian Film Festival Barcelonand | AFFBCN It covers a geographical area, ranging from Iran, Central Asia, a region comprising the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, to which are added 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, in the AFFBCN In 2025, films from more than twenty countries will be presented, highlighting some films as usual, but also screening titles from lesser-known countries. One of the festival's goals 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.
For more information: www.asianfilmfestival.barcelona
