The career honors keep coming for veteran screen star Michelle Yeoh. The Busan International Film Festival revealed Thursday that it has named the Oscar winner its Asian Filmmaker of the Year. Yeoh will accept the honor at the festival’s opening ceremony on Oct. 6 at the landmark Busan Cinema Center. 

Presented annually since 2003, the award recognizes a film professional or organization for exceptional contributions to Asian cinema — a description the Busan festival said Yeoh has readily fulfilled across her four-decade career in movies. 

Bursting into Hong Kong’s fabled world of martial arts action cinema with titles like Yes, Madam! (1985), Police Story 3: Supercop and Wing Chun, she helped redefine what women could do in the genre before going global with Tomorrow Never Dies and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Her recent Hollywood career — Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the Wicked films — then culminated with Everything Everywhere All at Once, which made her the first Asian performer to win the best actress Academy Award.

The Busan honor will continue a year of career-achievement recognition for Yeoh. In February, she became the first Asian woman to receive the Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. Fellow Oscar winner Sean Baker presented her with the award and later premiered Sandiwara, an 11-minute short he wrote, directed and shot on an iPhone in a Penang night market, with Yeoh starring as five intertwining characters. The Anora filmmaker described the film — which was financed by fashion house Self-Portrait —as both a love letter to his star and her native Malaysia.

Yeoh has personally curated a three-film program of her work for Busan, comprising Sandiwara, Everything Everywhere All at Once and the 2010 wuxia favorite Reign of Assassins. The festival will also screen It’s My Time, her first Chinese-language feature since the Oscar. Directed by Bai Xue, the crowd-pleasing drama, released in China last month, stars Yeoh as a septuagenarian who discovers a late-life gift for speedcubing, or competitive puzzle-solving. Fresh off her final turn as Madame Morrible in Wicked: For Good, Yeoh will next star in Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099.

Other recent Busan Filmmaker of the Year honorees have included Jafar Panahi (2025), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (2024), Chow Yun-fat (2023) and Tony Leung Chiu-wai (2022).

The 31st Busan International Film Festival runs Oct. 6-15, with Pachinko star Kim Minha hosting the opening ceremony where Yeoh will be feted. 

Michelle Yeoh has been named ‘Asian Filmmaker of the Year’ at the 31st Busan International Film Festival (BIFF). The annual award honors an Asian film professional or organization for exceptional contributions to the advancement of Asian cinema.

The festival commented: “Versatile, commanding, and fiercely resolute – Michelle Yeoh’s performances are transcendent in every aspect: technique, style, and presence. Yeoh revolutionized the representation of women in action cinema, establishing herself as one of Hong Kong cinema’s defining stars. 

“As the first Asian to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, she continues to move boldly between Asia and Hollywood, captivating global audiences with her magnetic screen presence and profound emotional depth.”

Born in Malaysia, Yeoh started her career in Hong Kong cinema starting with Yes, Madam! (1985), followed by iconic titles such as Police Story 3: Supercop (1992) and Wing Chun (1994), challenging the patriarchal conventions of the action genre along the way.

She gained international recognition through Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), a rare non-English-language film to achieve both global box-office success and widespread critical acclaim.

Her international career further developed with roles in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (2021), Wicked (2024), and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), which earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress as well as top honors at the SAG Awards and Golden Globes. She was also recently the first Asian woman to receive the Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. 

“With exceptional charisma, Yeoh forged a new image of the action heroine while continually exploring works ranging from genre films and art-house cinema to musical comedies,” Busan said in a statement. 

“Transitioning seamlessly from grounded, relatable everyday characters to a powerful, timeless persona, Yeoh possesses a remarkable versatility, delivering performances with delicacy but never fragility. Her dynamic and memorable characters continue to inspire new generations of actors and filmmakers. Through consistently nuanced performances that defy boundaries of age and convention, her singular body of work proves how an actor can expand the very imaginative horizons of cinema.”

Yeoh’s connections with BIFF date back to 2002 when she visited the festival for the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP, now known as the Asian Project Market). Many of her films have screened at the festival, including Far North (2007), Reign Of Assassins (2010), The Lady (2011), Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy (2018) – which played as the closing film of the 23rd BIFF – and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). 

She last attended the festival and walked the red carpet in 2011 with Luc Besson’s The Lady, in which she played the Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

At this year’s Busan (October 6-15), a Special Program in Focus will present three films personally handpicked by Yeoh: Reign Of Assassins, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Sandiwara (2026). Her latest feature, It’s My Time (2026), will also be screened. ‘The Asian Filmmaker of the Year’ award will be presented at the festival’s Opening Ceremony at the Busan Cinema Center on October 6. 

Previous recipients of the award have included Jafar Panahi (2025), Kurosawa Kiyoshi (2024), Chow Yun Fat (2023), and Tony Chiu-Wai Leung (2022).

This year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival will debut 21 feature films, 10 of which will screen as part of the festival’s official competition strand, which is set to run from August 13 to 19. 

Titles competing for the festival’s Sean Connery Prize include Mission, the latest feature from Scottish filmmaker Paul Wright (For Those In Peril), starring George MacKay and Rosy McEwen (Blue Jean). The film has been described as the “punk exploration” of an alienated young man who throws off the shackles of his solitary life in an attempt to experience the highs and lows of existence at its most extreme.

Also screening in competition is The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, a documentary feature about the American cartoonist and editor Harvey Kurtzman. The film includes contributions from Terry Gilliam, the late Stan Lee and Robert Crumb. And Little Miss Sunshine producer Marc Turtletaub returns to feature filmmaking with Borges and Me, his first feature as a director since 2023’s Jules. The film is an adaptation of Jay Parini’s bestselling memoir.  

This year’s edition also marks Festival Director Paul Ridd’s third at the helm. Ridd joined Edinburgh from Picturehouse in 2023, where he last served as head of acquisitions. 

“In these two past editions, we’ve created a festival with the competition strands at its core. They really have an identity now,” Ridd tells Deadline, adding that this year the festival has a record number of world premiere titles. The increase, he explains, best illustrates how Edinburgh has carved out a position for itself on the busy festival calendar. 

“We’re a legitimate launchpad for new and emerging filmmakers as well as established voices,” Ridd explains. “We have 10 films in competition each year, and last year seven of those 10 films went on to get distribution in the UK, U.S., or both.”

One of those titles was Elliot Tuttle’s much-talked-about feature Blue Film, which debuted at last year’s festival before landing in UK cinemas via Peccadillo Pictures and the U.S. with Obscured Releasing. The film follows a fetish camboy (Kieron Moore) who accepts a private house call, only to discover his masked client is his former middle-school teacher and a convicted sex offender.

Blue Film landed positive notices from critics out of Edinburgh and upon its theatrical release. Deadline’s critic Damon Wise described the film as a “very deftly played two-hander.” But shortly after the Edinburgh screening, Tuttle revealed the film had been turned down by every major festival it had been submitted to because of its subject matter. So why did Ridd and Edinburgh take a chance on the feature?

“It was just a film that embodied in many ways the things we value and think are important,” Ridd says. “It was made on a micro budget outside of traditional systems. It was made on a controversial subject and was beautifully acted. We saw it in those terms when we watched it.” 

The Incomer, the debut feature from Edinburgh-born filmmaker Louis Paxton, will open this year’s festival. Set on a remote Scottish island and starring Domhnall Gleeson (Ex Machina), the film follows siblings Isla (Rankin) and Sandy (O’Rourke), who have lived in peaceful isolation for decades, hunting seabirds, chatting to mythic creatures, and defending their isle from dreaded Incomers. The official synopsis reads: “Their world is upended with the arrival of Daniel (Gleeson), an awkward council worker, tasked with uprooting them to the mainland.” Louise Lockwood’s debut documentary feature Bel will close the festival. The film tells the story of Beldina Odenyo, the Kenyan-Scottish musician who performed under the stage name Heir of the Cursed. 

After Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands, a documentary feature on Scottish girl bands from the 1960s to the present in 2024, and Paul Sng’s Irvine Welsh doc Reality Is Not Enough, in 2025, Bel will be the third documentary on Scottish artistry to close Edinburgh in as many years. Ridd says the trend is “completely unintentional.” 

“We’re always looking for something to close the festival with the right spirit behind it, and it’s always a very difficult process,” he says. “It’s just very nice that in the last three years we’ve done three films which, in different ways, talk about artistic integrity and creation in ways that feel kind of interesting and innovative.”

With a smile, he adds: “But that is not to say that next year we’re absolutely guaranteeing that we’re going to close with a film about a Scottish artist.”

Elsewhere, Iranian filmmaker Abdolreza Kahani returns to Edinburgh with his latest feature Empty Heaven. The filmmaker was in competition last year with Mortician, which won the Sean Connery Prize. He used the £50,000 cash prize to fund Empty Heaven. In the Out of Competition strand, films screening include Carlos Conceição’s Bodyhackers, Molly Manners’ Extra Geography, Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest Her Private Hell, and Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. 

This year, Edinburgh also launches its honorary Outstanding Contribution to Cinema Award, which will be handed to actor and director Kenneth Branagh. The festival’s midnight madness strand continues with Chee Keong Cheung’s Bad Day at the Office, starring John Hannah, opening and Daniel Goldhaber’s latest feature, Faces Of Death, starring Barbie Ferreira (Euphoria) and Charli xcx, closing the strand. The EIFF lineup also features seven retrospective screenings, including a 30th-anniversary celebration of Trainspotting at Leith Theatre, with live cast and crew commentary, followed by DJ sets by Irvine Welsh and Darren Emerson.

“This is the first time something like this has been done on this scale, certainly in terms of the number of people who will be in the room watching it,” Ridd says of the live commentary event. 

“It’s really designed to emulate the format that was so popular with DVD commentaries, providing an opportunity for cast and crew to reflect on memories of making the film, or to just banter with one another.”

Edinburgh has yet to confirm which members of the film’s cast and crew will participate in the live commentary session; however, the film’s lead Ewan McGregor is confirmed for one of the festival’s industry in conversation sessions, so it is safe to speculate he will be present at the Leith Theatre. When asked whether director Danny Boyle might be present, Ridd smiles and deflects: “We’ve got some great people lined up,” he says.

“I think it’s going to be beautiful.”