Busan has locked its talk-and-teach programming for this year, and the names are the kind that make festival badges worth the price. The 31st Busan International Film Festival has confirmed its Master Class, Cine Class and Special Talk lineups, according to Variety, ahead of the festival's Oct. 6-15 run.

The Master Class slate, built around four directors unpacking their own process, is headlined by Na Hong-Jin, whose film Hope drew wide attention this year. He's joined by Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz and France's Bertrand Mandico, whose visual style has a cult following of its own. The real draw for animation heads, though, is Rintaro. The director behind Galaxy Express 999 (1979) and Metropolis (2001) is back in Korea for the first time in 17 years.

Cine Class, now in its second edition after launching last year, casts a wider net. Zhang Lu opens proceedings, fresh off winning the Busan Award for Best Film at BIFF 2025 for Gloaming in Luomu. Documentary filmmaker Seifollah Samadian will talk about his three-decade friendship with the late Abbas Kiarostami, a session that doubles as a piece of Iranian film history.

Judith Godrèche is on the bill too. Her public disclosures about abuse in the French film industry, per Variety, cracked open space for other women's accounts on screen, and her presence at Cine Class puts that reckoning directly on a festival stage. She shares the session with producer Billy Acumen, whose credits run from the Roundup franchise to 2026's The King's Warden. Rounding out Cine Class are director Bi Gan, known for a dreamlike visual sensibility since his first feature, and actor Shim Eun-kyung, whose career has moved across genres and borders without settling into one lane.

The Special Talk sessions lean more retrospective. Producer Kim Tae-ho, who has recently shifted into acquisitions and distribution, appears alongside a screening of Mother Mary (2026). Ann Hui, this year's Camellia Award recipient, gets a career-spanning conversation. And critic Jung Sung-il will anchor a session tied to the festival's Ahn Sung-ki tribute, built around a screening of the late actor's 1996 film Festival, using his filmography as a lens on Korean cinema history.

Taken together, the programming reads less like a random grab of famous names and more like a deliberate spread across generations and geographies, from a 1970s anime legend to a filmmaker whose testimony reshaped how the French industry talks about power. Busan runs Oct. 6-15 at the Busan Cinema Center and venues across the city, with the 21st Asian Contents & Film Market set for Oct. 10-13. Full schedules for individual sessions haven't been released yet.