The Asian Project Market (APM) returns to Busan from October 10-13 as part of the Asian Contents & Film Market, with this year’s selection placing an emphasis on filmmakers making their debut features.
Now in its 29th edition, this year’s market received a record 604 submissions from 48 countries and narrowed down the selection to 30 projects. Several debut projects come in the form of international co‑productions from filmmakers whose previous shorts have garnered attention at international festivals.
Also notable is the presence of established producers backing a new generation of voices, including Singapore’s Anthony Chen, whose work as a director includes Berlinale 2026 selection We Are All Strangers and Ilo Ilo, winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2013. He is attached as producer to Alvin Lee’s Talk To Me When You Are Dead.
Idiot (India-Fr)
Dir Stenzin Tankyong
Prods Ritu Sarin, Rajesh Thanickan, Jérôme Blesson, Flore Cavigneaux
Prod companies White Crane Films in association with La Belle Affaire Productions
Budget <$375,000 ($70,000 raised)
A remote school on the high-altitude Changthang plateau in Ladakh faces the risk of closure, and its survival falls on the shoulders of a single teenager — the far-from-studious Singay.
As a new teacher attempts to earn his trust and help him pass the academic year, the boy grapples with his grandmother’s imminent death, familial pressure to marry and increasingly desperate teachers plotting to help him cheat to save the school.
Idiot (Kakthet) is inspired by writer/director Tankyong’s own mother, a schoolteacher, who mentioned her dwindling class of five students.
“What seemed like an incidental observation revealed a quiet crisis,” he says. “Remote schools in the Himalayas are disappearing, taking with them the futures of the communities they serve.”
Through Singay, Tankyong hopes to explore education, identity and survival in a region caught between tradition and change.
Tankyong’s previous short Last Days Of Summer premiered in competition at Rotterdam in 2023 and went on to win the grand jury prize for best short at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.
Contact White Crane Films
Little Phnom Penh (Fr-Cam-US-Ger)
Dir Chheangkea
Prods Karen Madar, Daniel Mattes
Prod companies NoMad Productions, Anti-Archive, One Two Films
Little Phnom Penh, spanning two decades and set across two continents, paints a delicate portrait of a Cambodian woman as she moves through myriad identities, from hopeful teenager to neglected wife and immigrant to single mother.
For Chheangkea, a Cambodia-born filmmaker and New York University Tisch graduate, the sweeping romantic drama is deeply personal and inspired by his own childhood spent in Phnom Penh in the 1990s, and his subsequent move to the US with his single mother.
“What I want to show are people who have survived and are now seeking purpose, tenderness and a place to call home,” he says. “Although rooted in a Cambodian context, our film speaks primarily of what connects us all — first love, heartbreak, family and migration.”
The project marks his continued collaboration with producers Karen Madar and Daniel Mattes following 2025 short Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites, which premiered at Sundance where it won the jury award for international fiction.
Little Phnom Penh has also secured financing from several programmes including the Berlinale World Cinema Fund and the CNC Aide aux Cinémas du Monde.
Contact Karen Madar, NoMad Productions
Once Upon A Time In The Philippines (Phil-Fr-Nor)
Dir E del Mundo
Prods Kyle Nieva, Gian Carlo Librojo, Pamela Reyes
Prod companies Screen Asia, Piano Sano Films, DUOfilm
Budget $825,000 ($508,000 raised)
This coming-of-age drama follows Sam, a 19-year-old petrol station worker who is searching for her missing boyfriend. Along the way, she uncovers disturbing truths about the society in which she lives and finds herself complicit in a political militia’s massacre. While set in a fictitious part of the Philippines, the story is inspired by the Maguindanao massacre of 2009, in which 58 people were killed.
Shot on Super 16mm, the film aims to explore a collective psychological trauma through the lens of an atypical protagonist: a raw, morally grey and fractured young woman still finding herself.
“This project matters to me because I am Sam, the protagonist,” says del Mundo. “My sisters are Sam, my mother is Sam; all Filipinas I know are Sam, fighting for and understanding their place in a man’s world.”
The film has been developed through several labs including the Southeast Asian Film Lab and Cannes Producers Network.
Producers are Kyle Nieva and Gian Carlo Librojo, who reunite with the director following Yellowfin, a VR film that premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes Immersive.
Contact Kyle Nieva, Screen Asia
Talk To Me When You Are Dead (Sing-China)
Dir Alvin Lee
Prods Anthony Chen, Gina Tan
Prod company Giraffe Pictures
Budget $1m
Set in the not-so-distant future, a grieving programmer builds an AI in his late wife’s likeness, preserved on his tablet. When his grief is compounded by financial struggles, he takes a shady job that involves going undercover in the home of a dying architect to secretly build an AI replica of the man.
Singaporean writer/director and Beijing Film Academy graduate Lee aims to explore grief in an age where technology can conjure uncanny incarnations of lost ones.
“We try to talk to the dead through photographs, prayer rituals or even in our head,” says Lee. “Now technology can allow them to answer us back.
“If something artificial can give us comfort, does that make the feeling any less real? When does comfort become another way of refusing to let go?”
The film is produced by Giraffe Pictures, a Singapore-based film and TV company founded by Anthony Chen and producer Huang Wenhong, which champions emerging Asian filmmakers.
Chen’s debut Ilo Ilo won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2013 and his latest feature We Are All Strangers competed at this year’s Berlinale. Gina Tan, a Busan Asian Film School fellow, also produces.
Contact Giraffe Pictures
Unripe (China-Fr)
Dir Wang Zhiyi
Prod Emmanuel Chaumet
Prod company Ecce Films
Budget $500,000 (~$100,000 raised)
Twelve-year-old Mai witnesses her father with another woman at a shopping mall, and lies to protect him after her mother discovers a sanitary pad in the family car, claiming it is hers despite not having had her first period. Weaving a fragile web of lies she does not quite understand herself, Mai becomes increasingly drawn into the cracks of her parents’ precarious marriage.
London Film School graduate Wang envisions this family thriller not as a crime to be solved, but as the suspense of a child trying to understand the two people she knows best. It was inspired by questioning how the perception of his own family would have differed had he been born a girl.
“Children experience their parents’ relationships far more messily,” says Wang. “They notice everything and understand only parts of it. The film is also about the moment you first understand that your parents are simply people, with fears and compromises of their own.”
Set in a large, modern city in southern China, Wang also hopes to portray what he deems to be an underrepresented middle class in independent cinema, with stable and comfortable-looking home lives juxtaposed against what happens behind closed doors.
The project will make its first international industry appearance at APM, with Wang hoping to begin filming in 2027.
Contact Ecce Films
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