Majid Majidi wins Busan Film Festival prize with Midday Meal
International Film Festival for Midday Meal, a drama about a rural schoolteacher struggling to provide free lunches to students amid government cuts, making the film eligible for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar.
Majidi received the award from Chinese director Zhang Yimou, president of the festival’s Competition jury. In his acceptance speech, the veteran filmmaker protested the war in Iran, particularly the Minab school attack in February, which the article says killed 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren, in a US military strike.
“They will stand firm to the end and fight to get their independence back,” Majidi said, before concluding: “I wish for a future with no war.”
Midday Meal continues Majidi’s focus on social realism, humanism and child welfare, themes that have featured throughout his career. His previous films include The Color of Paradise and Sun Children, which competed at the Venice Film Festival in 2020.
Majidi remains best known internationally for Children of Heaven (1998), the first Iranian film to receive a nomination in the Academy Awards category now known as Best International Feature. Under new Academy rules introduced this year, the Busan win automatically qualifies Midday Meal for Oscar consideration without requiring Iran to submit it officially. Iran has already entered Land of Angels for this year’s awards.
Busan was the sixth and final festival added to the Academy’s list of qualifying events. Other films securing eligibility through festival awards include Shame and Money and To Hold a Mountain, both from Sundance; Yellow Letters from Berlin; Fjord and Woman Unknown from Cannes; and Angh from Toronto.
Taiwanese family drama To Be Ordinary won Best Director for Lee Yun Chan, whose film was praised for its restrained approach and empathetic storytelling. Lee said in her acceptance speech that she wore the same gown she had worn when presenting her 2005 debut, The Shoe Fairy, at Busan.
Indonesian director Eddie Cahyono received the Special Jury Prize for Ibuku, about a working-class widow whose adult daughter is imprisoned in Saudi Arabia.
The festival’s gender-neutral acting award was shared by Japanese newcomer Kashun Himeno, who stars as a lovestruck high-school student in Satoko Always, and Chinese actor Zhou Xun, who portrays a single mother dealing with her father’s death in The First Taste of Loneliness. The latter film also won the Artistic Contribution Award for sound designer Danfeng Li.
In the New Currents competition for first features, Indian filmmaker Shashank Walia won for Birds in the Dark, a film about corruption and land disputes in rural Punjab. South Korean director Lim Ha-yeon’s Beach Fictions, which also screened in the main competition, received a special jury mention.
Zhang led the Competition jury, which included Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, directors Kei Ishikawa and July Jung, actors Samal Yeslyamova and Choi Hee-seo, and producer Tran Thi Bich Ngoc. The awards were presented at an outdoor closing ceremony at the Busan Film Center, hosted by South Korean singer and actor Yim Si-wan.