The festival opens the call for submissions for films that could be part of the program. Asian Film Festival Barcelonand | AFFBCN 2026, which will celebrate its fourteenth edition from October 22 to November 1, 2026.
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 deadlineFriday, July 31, 2026.
Shipping of material: To the following email addresses:
ppgad@pucrs.br
ppgad@pucrs.br
ppgad@pucrs.br
Materials: viewing in digital file, VIMEO or other similar formats; film technical sheet, electronic press kit, stills, trailer (if any) and a brief biography of the director.
Selection of titles received: The festival's programming committee will announce the selected titles to the relevant responsible person via email.
Requirements:
- The festival will only accept films produced between 2024 and 2026.
- 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.
- Regarding the translation of subtitles into Spanish and/or Catalan and their projection in cinemas, 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 area with Australia and New Zealand.
As in previous editions, in the AFFBCN In 2026, films from over twenty countries will be presented, highlighting certain film industries as usual, but also showcasing titles from lesser-known countries. One of the festival's objectives is to explore the stranger or foreigner that cinema presents to us and to stimulate an interest in discovery. Therefore, the program aims to be inclusive; not so much with the intention of including more titles each year, but to give visibility to both established filmmakers with a following and to lesser-known ones. The proposal consists of offering opportunities to explore local and global narratives and trajectories, in order to reclaim cultures that are identity markers, whose visibility provides us with essential knowledge of what we consider other, strange, or foreign, in relation to the land 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
