Iranian Drama 'Noon Meal' Wins Top Prize at Busan, Qualifies for Oscar Consideration

Majid Majidi, director of 'Noon Meal', dedicated the award to the people of Iran. Taiwan's Lee Yun-chan won Best Director, and Zhou Zhun and Kashun Himeno took the acting awards at the festival's closing ceremony.

Iranian director Majid Majidi's "Ghaza Zohr" won the best film award at the Busan International Film Festival on Thursday, and is an acclaimed drama about a teacher who tries to feed his students to reach the best international Oscar competition.

The seven-member Busan jury, led by Chinese filmmaking legend Zhang Yimou, said its decision was unanimous. The buzz surrounding Majidi's film had been building all week in Busan, with many predicting—correctly—that it would take home the top prize.

Accepting the honor at the Busan Cinema Center, Majidi dedicated his victory to the people of Iran and used parts of his speech to condemn the civilian casualties of the US-led war against his country.

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He said: I would like to present this award to the brave heroes of Iran, the people of Iran who have stood firm all these years and continue to resist oppression.

He added: On the first day of this war in Iran, a school in Minab was hit and 120 innocent students were killed, and even now the bodies of some of them have not been found. What crime have our people committed, it is nothing but that our people want to be independent. They are standing till the end."

In the end, he said: I wish for a world where there is no more war, full of peace, love and brotherhood.

Zahrmil dazzled Busan critics with its powerful and allegorical storytelling and confident visual style. The story of the film is about Dawood Solan (Mohammed Rahimi), a contract teacher in a remote village in southeastern Iran, whose hopes of getting a permanent government job are jeopardized when a wealthy benefactor dies and the free lunches that keep his poor students come to school disappear. Determined to save both his school and his future, Solan resorts to desperate measures, including dangerous cross-border fuel smuggling, as his natural decency clashes with his modest ambitions.

The film continues Majidi's long-standing thematic concern with the moral pressures facing people on the fringes of society, as seen in previous festival-winning works such as Rang Behesht (1999) and Baran (2001). For Nimroz Food, he assembled a completely non-professional group of street actors in the region and set their performances against the sinister and otherworldly landscape of Iran's Martian mountains.

At a press conference earlier in the festival, Majidi spoke at length about how he had turned down an invitation to travel to South Korea due to feeling depressed and tired of the dire situation at home. He ultimately decided that the trip would allow him and his film to convey "some kind of little message from my people to people in other nations and other places."

Majidi's victory on Thursday night also helps fuel the Oscar buzz. The Busan festival introduced its main competition just last year, bringing its award structure closer to leading European cinema events. According to the rules introduced by the Film Academy, the Busan Best Film winner can be presented without being selected by the Oscar committee of its country for international feature film review (Busan joins Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto in the list of Academy festivals whose designated awards are reviewed in this way).

Iran has already selected Babak Khaje Pasha's Land of Angels, a drama about children who endure the war in Gaza, as its official submission for the 99th Academy Awards. But Midday Meal now has an open alternative route to the race.

Majidi previously made Oscar history with Behesht's Children (1376), which was the first Iranian film to be nominated in the international category, which was recognized as the best foreign language film at the time.

Among the competition's main winners, Indonesian director Eddy Kahyuno received the Special Jury Prize for Ibuku. Veteran actress Christine Hakim stars as a widow whose late husband's gambling debts force her to marry her only daughter, setting off a painful mother-daughter drama.

Taiwan's Lee Yun-chan won best director for Being Ordinary, about a family whose strained relationship is tested by a devastating incident. The award marks a return to the Busan spotlight for Lee, whose debut film, Shoe Fairy, premiered in the festival's New Currents section in 2005.

The two best actor awards were given to Chinese star Zhou Sun and Japanese newcomer Kashun Himeno. Zhou is best known for Gu You's The First Taste of Loneliness, which follows three generations of women going through grief after the death of the family patriarch. The film also won the Artistic Contribution Award for Li Danfeng's sound work. Himeno won for her debut in Shoichi Okita's Satoko Always. She plays the youngest of three women who share the same name but are at different stages of life, each turning to writing to make sense of their experiences.

India's Shashank Walia previously won the New Currents award for Birds in the Dark, a Punjabi-language black-and-white drama that explores class, work and love in rural Punjab. Backed by filmmaker Hansal Mehta, the film previously won the Songwon Vision Audience Award for the Asian title. And a special nod to New Currents was South Korean director Lim Hyeon's first beach fiction film, about a young woman who escapes to a beach town and encounters a novelist, a magician and a fortune teller.

Zhang's jury evaluated 13 competition titles. Chinese director Bi Gun, Korean actor Moon Choi, Japanese filmmaker Kei Ishikawa, Korean director July Yong, Vietnamese producer Tran Ti Bich Ngoc and Kazakh actress Samal Yesliamova were present in this panel.

Busan organizers reported total attendance at this year's festival of more than 200,000 moviegoers, the event's largest crowd since 2015. Other programs and special events drew another 77,000 attendees, they said. The festival related this growth to the changes in the opening program and its extensive screening program. The Asian Content and Mobile Film Market, which was held from October 10 to 13, attracted 30,484 participants and 339 companies from 32 countries.

In other star-studded moments, the 31st edition of BIFF, which ran from October 6 to 15, welcomed Alfonso Cuarón on his first trip to South Korea alongside guests including Charlotte Gainsbourg, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fan Bingbing, Hirokazu Koreida, Lee Chang-dong An, Naf Deong and Naf Deong. Michelle Yeoh won the Asian Filmmaker of the Year award at the opening ceremony, and Hong Kong director Ann Hui received the Camellia Award.

The full list of this year's BIFF Awards winners is below.