The BFI London Film Festival has unveiled the programme for its 70th edition, and Asian cinema will once again form an essential part of the celebration. From long-awaited works by some of the continent’s most respected filmmakers to daring debuts, intimate documentaries and large-scale genre spectacles, this year’s selection reflects the extraordinary breadth of filmmaking emerging from across East, Southeast and South Asia.

Taking place from 7 to 18 October 2026, the festival will present 251 works from 88 countries, including feature films, shorts, series and immersive projects. Every feature and series in the programme will be shown to UK audiences for the first time.

One of the festival’s biggest Asian titles is undoubtedly Possible Love, the first film from South Korean master Lee Chang-dong since Burning in 2018. Presented as a Gala screening, the drama brings together an impressive cast led by Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Zo In-sung and Cho Yeo-jeong.

The story follows two married couples from markedly different social backgrounds whose lives become entangled when filmmaker Ye-ji begins making a documentary about workers affected by redundancy. As professional curiosity gives way to a far more personal involvement, the film explores class, marriage, suppressed desire and the uncomfortable power dynamics between those who observe and those whose lives become material for somebody else’s work. At 164 minutes, Lee appears to be returning with another patiently constructed and morally complex examination of contemporary Korean society.

South Korea is also represented by Mokya Shin’s documentary Easter, centred on Sekja, an ageing Korean trans burlesque performer. Moving beyond the stage, the film follows its subject as she reflects on love, ageing, connection and her long career in Korea’s adult-entertainment world. Through elaborate costumes, dance sequences and intimate recollections, Easter is a personal portrait of a performer considering what remains when the spotlight begins to fade.

Japanese cinema has an equally prominent place in the programme. Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Look Back, a live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s acclaimed manga. Spanning more than a decade, the film follows Fujino and Kyomoto, two very different young women drawn together by their shared ambition to become manga artists. Their creative partnership develops into a profound friendship, but success eventually confronts them with decisions capable of pulling them apart. With Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita in the leading roles, the film sees Kore-eda turning his sensitive eye towards artistic ambition, collaboration and the relationships that shape a creative life.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden is another major Japanese highlight. The 196-minute drama stars Virginie Efira as Marie-Lou, the director of a French nursing home who faces resistance after introducing a model of care built around dignity. Her encounter with Mari, a Japanese theatre director living with cancer, develops into a transformative connection between the two women. Hamaguchi, whose Evil Does Not Exist screened in the festival’s Official Competition in 2023, once again examines the quiet, almost imperceptible ways in which one person can alter the course of another’s life.

At the opposite end of the cinematic scale, Takashi Yamazaki brings Japan’s most famous monster back to the screen in Godzilla Minus Zero. Set in 1949, the sequel finds Kōichi, Noriko and their adopted daughter Akiko attempting to rebuild their lives after the events of Godzilla Minus One. Their fragile peace does not last for long, as another threat begins to stir beneath the sea. Billed as the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX, it is likely to be one of the festival’s biggest visual spectacles.

Documentary audiences can also look forward to Erik Shirai’s Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing, which gains rare access to the physically and mentally demanding world of Japanese sumo. Following several wrestlers over the course of a year, the film looks beyond popular stereotypes to examine the discipline, sacrifices and traditions that sustain the ancient sport.

Southeast Asian filmmakers make a particularly strong showing across the programme’s competitive and thematic strands. Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s Thai-language fiction debut 9 Temples to Heaven will compete for the Sutherland Award in the First Feature Competition. The film follows an ageing grandmother and her family as they undertake a nine-temple pilgrimage after receiving a prophecy. Taking place over one day, the journey becomes a gently humorous exploration of faith, intergenerational bonds and the small gestures through which families care for one another.

Also competing for the Sutherland Award is Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering. Set among female garment workers in Yangon, the Myanmar filmmaker’s debut charts the developing relationship between two young women as their friendship grows increasingly intimate and dangerous. The film arrives in London after winning the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Vietnamese filmmaker Lê Bảo, meanwhile, presents Hearing, a meditative drama about a decibel-reading technician who begins detecting hidden tensions within the sonic world around him. Encounters in cemeteries, zoos and other everyday spaces become part of an unconventional study of sound, isolation and the fragile connections between people.

Filipino cinema is represented by two very different films. Rafael Manuel’s Filipiñana follows a 17-year-old “tee-girl” during her first week working at an exclusive Manila golf club. As she learns its rigid hierarchy and unspoken rules, the club becomes a sharp microcosm of class, colonial legacy and exploitation. Isabel Sandoval’s Moonglow, meanwhile, moves into the territory of sensual neo-noir. Set in 1970s Manila, it follows a police officer-turned-criminal who discovers that a major robbery she committed is being investigated by a former lover.

China’s selection includes Zhong Kaifeng’s ambitious debut Atlantic Rhapsody, an absurdist father-and-son drama spanning two decades of recent Chinese history. Built around a young man’s surreal search for his absent father, the film uses oceans, fragmented time and complex sound design to blur the boundary between memory and reality.

In A Girl Unknown, filmmaker Zou Jing explores the generational consequences of China’s one-child policy. The film follows Wu Lian, who is taken from her mother and rural home at the age of six and sent to live with an unfamiliar family in the city. Unfolding across a decade, the coming-of-age drama examines identity, abandonment and the emotional damage left behind by policies that treated children’s lives as something to be administratively rearranged.

From Hong Kong, Wong Siu-pong’s documentary The Whisper of Sunlight follows three young women living with terminal conditions and the families caring for them. Their experiences raise difficult questions about experimental treatment, financial inequality and the uncertainty surrounding access to a drug that could offer a final source of hope.

South Asian cinema also moves confidently between social realism, genre and restored classics. Rubaiyat Hossain’s Bangladeshi feminist body-horror The Difficult Bride follows a woman preparing for her wedding who begins to resist the beauty rituals and social expectations imposed upon her. As pressure mounts for her to become thinner, fairer and more conventionally “bride-like”, that resistance takes physical and increasingly supernatural form.

Pakistan’s Sarmad Sultan Khoosat brings Lali, a pitch-black, genre-bending comedy about two emotionally wounded strangers pushed into an arranged marriage. Zeba is believed to be cursed after two previous fiancés died, while Sajawal carries his own history and insecurities. Their uneasy union develops into an unpredictable story combining social observation, dark humour and supernatural suggestion.

India is represented in competition by Shalini Adnani’s Our Share of Sand, which examines class inequality, child labour, corruption and environmental exploitation through the perspective of a young woman returning to her rural family home. Ankur Hooda’s documentary The Calf Doll offers a quieter but equally political reflection on rural change, following a retired professor who turns to an old ritual when his cow gives birth to a stillborn calf. Against this intimate story, industrialisation and migration steadily transform the surrounding Haryana landscape.

The festival will also screen a new 4K restoration of Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah. Released in 1972 and starring the incomparable Meena Kumari, the tragic musical remains one of the great achievements of classical Indian cinema. Its return to the big screen provides an important bridge between the festival’s celebration of new voices and the Asian films that continue to shape cinema’s history.

Nepalese filmmaker Abinash Bikram Shah’s Elephants in the Fog arrives after making history as the first Nepali feature selected for Cannes’ Official Selection. The film centres on Pirati, the matriarch of a kinnar community, whose search for her missing anointed daughter forces her to cross the social and spiritual boundaries separating the community from the rest of the village.

Together, these films resist any attempt to treat “Asian cinema” as a single movement or aesthetic. They encompass intimate character studies, political documentaries, queer stories, slow cinema, body horror, animation, noir and one very large radioactive monster. More importantly, the programme places established masters alongside filmmakers presenting their first features, allowing audiences to encounter both the continuing evolution of celebrated auteurs and the emergence of voices that may shape the next generation of world cinema.

The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026. Priority booking opens for BFI Patrons on 9 September and BFI Members on 10 September, with tickets going on general sale on 17 September. The complete programme is available through the official BFI London Film Festival website.

Featured image courtesy of BFI LFF

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