Five projects to watch at the 2025 Asian Project Market

The Asian Project Market (APM) remains the core industry showcase of the Asian Contents & Film Market and runs from September 20-23 alongside the 30^th Busan International Film Festival.

This year’s APM features 30 in-development projects representing 15 countries, selected from a record-breaking 455 submissions. Titles with notable ties to Busan include Black Star Angel from US-Armenian filmmaker Christine Haroutounian and Eve Baswel’s second feature Heaven Help Us!, both previously backed by the Asian Cinema Fund’s (ACF) script development programme.

Chinese feature New Life not only benefits from ACF, but also unites director/producer duo Yingtong Li and Annie Song, who are alumni of the Chanel X BIFF Asian Film Academy.

Two filmmakers are returning after previous success here: Pradip Kurbah, the Jiseok winner in 2019 for Market; and Park Riwoong, who won the New Currents award for The Land Of Morning Calm last year.

Black Star Angel (Arm-US)

Dir Christine Haroutounian
Prod Maxwell Schwartz, Christine Haroutounian
Production company Mankazar Film
Budget <$1m ($75,000 private equity)

US-born Haroutounian returns with her second feature following debut After Dreaming, which played at this year’s Berlinale. Set between Jerusalem, Armenia and Paris, the film will explore the female body amidst violence. Partially inspired by real events following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabagh war, it will depict the recruitment of female conscripts using an “abrupt, corporeal, and kinetic” approach.

“Using the female body as my central material, I am asking how the feminine lives in violence, in a world where war, terror and porn have radicalized global spectatorship,” she says. “If After Dreaming was a cinematic prayer, Black Star Angel is designed to feel like blunt force trauma.”

Working between Armenia and the US, Haroutounian short World screened at Rotterdam in 2020 before her debut feature played in the Forum section of the Berlinale in February and was picked up for sales by Alief.

Black Star Angel is in late development and is executive produced by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, who won best director at Cannes in 2012 with Post Tenebras Lux.

Contact: Mankazar Film 

Gilddong (S Kor)

Dir Park Riwoong
Prod Ahn Byungrae
Production company Gozip Studio
Budget $10.7m ($72,000 raised) 

Set in mid-Joseon Korea, this story reimagines folk hero Hong Gildong through multiple timelines and perspectives. Director Park envisions a realism-driven approach in a bid to distance the project from the stylised approach often associated with period dramas.

“I imagined what it would be like if we could take a camera back to 16th-century Hanyang and simply capture what people felt and experienced in their daily lives,” he says. “If we could convey that immediacy and raw presence, then even a single frame—without ornate sets or exaggerated mannerisms—could reveal the joy, anger, sorrow, and hope of the people of that era.”

The film will mark the third feature from director Park who received acclaim for his 2022 debut The Girl On A Bulldozer, which won two prizes including best director at Korea’s Grand Bell awards, and The Land of Morning Calm, which scooped Busan’s New Currents award and two further trophies at the festival in 2024.

Produced by Ahn Byungrae’s Gozip Studio, which has backed Park since his debut, Gilddong marks Park’s most ambitious work to date. The project is supported by Kofic and the Busan Film Commission. At the market, he hopes to find co-production partners for its overseas shoots.

Contact: Gozip Studio 

Heaven Help Us! (Phil)

Dir Eve Baswel
Prod John Torres, Jules Katanyag, Danzen Santos Katanyag
Production company Los Otros, Digital Dreams Inc.
Budget $850,000 ($106,000 raised from Asian Cinema Fund, Quezon City Film Commission and CMB Film Services) 

The third feature of Filipino director Baswel revisits the 1981 collapse of the Manila Film Center, built under the Marcos regime to host a film festival intended to rival Cannes. While the Marcoses sought spectacle, Baswel’s focus will be on the construction workers on a day that saw at least 169 workers fall into the rapid-drying cement of the foundation.

“I don’t want to tell this story for the horror,” she says. “I want to see these workers as they are in that moment — eating lunch, joking to kill time, navigating their lives on what would unknowingly be their last day.”

Seven years in development, the project is rooted in Baswel’s own experience of precarious work as a young freelancer, working long hours under tough conditions. She says the tone will be both distant and intimate in depicting the tragedy.

Baswel’s short Walay Balay premiered at Cannes in Directors’ Fortnight last year while her 2019 debut Tia Madre was acquired by Netflix Philippines.

The project is supported by the QCinema Project Market Co-production fund.

Contact: Jeremy Santos Quiambao, CMB Film Services 

New Life (China)

Dir Yingtong Li
Prod Annie Song
Budget $400,000 

Chinese filmmaker Li’s debut feature is set in a small southern Chinese seaside town and explores how loss and superstition intertwine in a mother-daughter relationship. It is inspired by the grief and guilt experienced by Li’s mother following her father’s death.

“At its heart, it explores how grief intertwines with superstition, how one seeks balance after a profound loss, and ultimately, how love endures,” says Li. “What excites me most as a filmmaker is the opportunity to illuminate a rarely depicted cultural reality — the way traditional beliefs, even when only half-believed, can leave lasting emotional scars.”

Conceived as an intimate chamber piece, Li plans to adopt a restrained, observational style that moves between realism and dreamlike textures, with the camera kept at a deliberate distance to reflect isolation and entrapment.

The project is in early development and is produced by Annie Song, whose credits include The Wind Will Say, which premiered at Buan in 2022, and Frankenfish By The River, which debuted at China’s First International Film Festival last year.

Li’s 2022 short The Silent Whistle premiered at Cannes and won a Gotham Award short film showcase prize.

Contact: Yingtong Li

Moon (India)

Dir Pradip Kurbah
Prod Pradip Kurbah, Shankar Lall Goenka
Production company Kurbah Films, Hello Meghalaya, Shiven Arts
Budget $280,000 (approximately 30% raised) 

Set in a Khasi town in the hills of Meghalaya in northeast India, this project intends to explore memory, guilt and a search for redemption.

“All humans live with guilt, something we carry inside but rarely share,” says award-winning director Kurbah. “I wanted to ask, if we speak of it, will it bring peace or more pain?

“The characters carry wounds they cannot name, shaped by guilt, family pressure, and choices made during difficult times.”

He aims to make the film slow and poetic in tone, rooted in the monsoon mood of the Khasi Hills, with rain acting as a metaphor for cleansing and renewal. Utilising long takes and natural light, Kurbah envisions a calm, immersive style inspired by the rhythms of Khasi oral traditions where silence and memory carry as much weight as spoken words.

A self-taught filmmaker from Shillong, Kurbah won best film and best director at this year’s Moscow International Film Festival with The Elysian Field.

Produced by Kurbah Films, the project has secured part of its budget through the Hello Meghalaya initiative and Shiven Arts, with seasoned local actors already attached. At APM, the team is seeking collaborators to help Khasi stories travel onto the international stage.

Contact: Kurbah Films 

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