SHOWTIME: Sunday 10:00 PM - 11:28 PM

SYNOPSIS: A surreal and socially critical horror-satire that uses a sterile Japanese supermarket as a sharp microcosm of modern corporate society. Inside the store, expressionless employees are subjected to a ruthless supervisor who demands a robotic, zombie-like friendliness at all costs. Amidst the suffocating, soul-crushing environment, a young worker named Sakai refuses to let go of his humanity, desperately holding onto hope as the workplace descends into a psychological nightmare.

DIRECTOR: Yusuke Iwasaki | LANGUAGE: Japanese

YEAR: 2026 | RUNNING TIME: 88 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Japan | GENRE: Horror

SHOWTIME: Sunday 7:30 PM - 9:28 PM

SYNOPSIS: A masterfully paced, high-octane zombie action masterpiece. The story follows a cynical, workaholic fund manager and his young daughter as they board a sleek bullet train from Seoul to Busan. Their journey transforms into a claustrophobic fight for survival when a catastrophic viral outbreak sweeps across South Korea, trapping the passengers inside speeding train cars filled with a rapidly multiplying horde of aggressive, fast-moving undead.

DIRECTOR: Yeon Sang-ho | LANGUAGE: Korean

YEAR: 2016 | RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Korea | GENRE: Action - Horror

SHOWTIME: Sunday 5:00 PM - 7:02 PM

SYNOPSIS: A refreshingly bleak, darkly humorous corporate satire following Fren, a weary human resources manager tasked with interviewing bright-eyed young applicants for a notoriously toxic company. While navigating her daily corporate duties, Fren discovers she is secretly pregnant, plunging her into a quiet existential crisis as she grapples with the terrifying reality of bringing a child into a modern, hyper-capitalist world that seems designed to erode human empathy.

DIRECTOR: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit | LANGUAGE: Thai

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 122 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Thailand | GENRE: Drama

SHOWTIME: Sunday 2:30 PM - 3:54 PM

SYNOPSIS: An insightful and engaging sports documentary that traces the profound cultural connection between Japan and the United States through their shared love of baseball. Delving into the history of how the sport crossed international borders, the film examines how baseball served as a powerful tool for diplomacy, healing, and mutual respect during pivotal historical eras. Through archival footage and interviews, it celebrates the legendary players and unsung heroes who used the diamond to bridge two distinct cultures.

DIRECTOR: Yuriko Romer | LANGUAGE: English / Japanese

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 92 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: U.S. / Japan | GENRE: Doc

SHOWTIME: Sunday 12:00 PM - 2:03 PM

SYNOPSIS: A deeply personal drama following Cheol-jun, a young North Korean defector living in Seoul who carries the exhausting weight of a double life. While building a tight-knit community of friends who feel like brothers, he secretly hides his identity as a gay man. Gathering the courage to finally step into South Korea’s underground queer community, he finds love and belonging, but a sudden misunderstanding threatens to shatter the fragile new life he has fought so hard to build.

DIRECTOR: Park Joon-ho | LANGUAGE: Korean

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 124 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Korea | GENRE: Drama - LGBTQ

SHOWTIME: Saturday 11 PM - 11:57 PM

SYNOPSIS: When the sun goes down, the rules go out the window. Our Late Night Shorts program is home to the bold, the bizarre, the thrilling, and the delightfully unexpected. From dark comedy and horror to surreal visions and genre-bending experiments, these films embrace the strange, the unsettling, and the wildly entertaining. Whether they'll make you laugh, squirm, gasp, or all three at once, each short pushes storytelling in unexpected directions. If you're looking for the festival's most unpredictable ride, this is it.

RUNNING TIME: 57 minutes | COLOR

SHOWTIME: Saturday 8:45 PM - 10:30 PM

SYNOPSIS: A fast-paced, visceral neo-noir road movie set within a fictional tropical state near Singapore. Siam, a low-level drug courier, finds himself in a lethal predicament after misplacing a high-value stash belonging to a ruthless kingpin with a zero-tolerance policy for failure. Desperate to recoup the cash before his boss finds out, Siam enlists a friend for a frantic rescue mission, triggering a chaotic downward spiral through the volatile underbelly of modern Malay society.

DIRECTOR: Sun-J Perumal | LANGUAGE: Malay/Tamil

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Malaysia | GENRE: Crime - Thriller

SHOWTIME: Saturday 6:30 PM - 8:15 PM

SYNOPSIS: An atmospheric, tension-filled psychological horror film that preys on the universal fear of the unknown. Set against a brooding Japanese backdrop, the story follows a group of characters who become trapped in an isolated environment as darkness falls. Forced to confront both supernatural threats and their own escalating paranoia, the survivors must navigate a web of secrets and fractured trust to make it through the night alive.

DIRECTOR: Dave Boyle | LANGUAGE: Japanese

YEAR: 2024 | RUNNING TIME: 105 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Japan | GENRE: Horror

SHOWTIME: Saturday 3:45 PM - 5:23 PM

SYNOPSIS: Crafted as an intensely raw investigative home movie, this moving documentary follows filmmaker Tony Nguyen on an extraordinary personal quest to solve the 50-year-old mystery of his missing father, who was lost in the chaos surrounding the Fall of Saigon. Weaving together poignant moments of unexpected humor and deep heartache, the film offers an intimate exploration of family secrets, generational trauma, and how the children of refugees are deeply shaped by war and loss.

DIRECTOR: Tony Nguyen | LANGUAGE: English / Vietnamese

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 98 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: U.S. / Vietnam | GENRE: Doc

SHOWTIME: Saturday 1:30 PM - 3:16 PM

SYNOPSIS: A stark, emotionally gripping high school drama centered on Yun-ji, a first-year student who finds herself pregnant following a secret affair with her homeroom teacher. When the teacher suddenly vanishes without a trace, a desperate Yun-ji cuts class to obtain illegal abortion pills, believing his return hinges on ending the pregnancy. Accompanied by her roommate Kyung-sun, who is on her own frantic quest to recover her missing life savings, the two girls embark on a deeply unsettling journey of survival.

DIRECTOR: Yoo Jae-in | LANGUAGE: Korean

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Korea | GENRE: Drama

SHOWTIME: Saturday 12 PM - 1:20 PM

SYNOPSIS: From acclaimed writer-director Kim Jong-kwan (Shades of the Heart, The Table) comes an exquisitely constructed, Rohmer-esque mosaic of love, desire, and disillusionment. Set against the beautifully evocative backdrop of Seoul's historic Seochon neighborhood, *Frosted Window* unfolds across three distinct chapters tracking the changing of the seasons. Moving fluidly from a light, humorous look at the vagaries of modern romance to a poignant, meta-cinematic gaze into the weight of emotional loss, the film charts the transient connections, awkward tensions, and hidden memories of its subjects. Like a winter frost blurring the view, Kim's understated direction observes human relationships from a distance that is at once beautifully blurred and deeply intimate.

DIRECTOR: Kim Jong-kwan | LANGUAGE: Korean

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: South Korea | GENRE: Drama - Art

SHOWTIME: Friday 8:30 PM - 9:57 PM

SYNOPSIS: A surreal, mid-length psychological J-horror mockumentary directed by Hiroki Nishii and produced by the acclaimed film label NOTHING NEW. The film unfolds the unsettling mystery surrounding a long-abandoned Japanese amusement park known as "Gamaland." When a group of urban explorers uncovers a strange, decades-old VHS tape tracking a woman named Miyuki Sawada's final visit to the park, they are inadvertently drawn into a dark, reality-bending nightmare. What begins as a nostalgic infiltration of a decaying tourist trap quickly devolves into a haunting confrontation with an isolated community's deepest, most terrifying secrets.

DIRECTOR: Hiroki Nishii | LANGUAGE: Japanese

YEAR: 2026 | RUNNING TIME: 59 Minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Japan | GENRE: Sci Fi / Horror

SHOWTIME: Friday 6:15 PM - 7:58 PM

SYNOPSIS: A gripping and grounded immigrant drama following Lu, a New York City food delivery rider who has spent years working to set up a studio apartment for the long-awaited arrival of his wife and young daughter. His fragile plans are thrown into chaos when his rented e-bike is stolen, stripping him of his livelihood and threatening his housing. Desperate to raise a fresh $1,200 deposit before his family's flight lands, Lu turns to old acquaintances, only to find his past deception has left him a pariah in his own community. Facing eviction after a trusted friend vanishes with his rent money, Lu is forced into an exhausting, high-stakes moral descent through the city's underbelly—ultimately turning to theft himself to salvage the fragile illusion of the American Dream before his family steps off the plane.

DIRECTOR: Lloyd Lee Choi | LANGUAGE: English

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 103 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: US/Canada | GENRE: Drama

SHOWTIME: Friday 4:00 PM - 5:43 PM

SYNOPSIS: A hard-boiled noir thriller following Au Yeung Wai-yip, an unfulfilled Hong Kong private investigator working the humid streets of Kuala Lumpur. His routine workflow takes a sharp, dizzying turn when he accepts three separate infidelity cases on the same day—only to discover that one of the suspected targets is his own estranged wife. When one of his subjects is murdered, the PI is plunged into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with a haunted homicide detective who harbors a dark secret of his own.

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Li, Choy Man-yu | LANGUAGE: Cantonese

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 102 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Hong Kong / Malaysia | GENRE: Thriller

SHOWTIME: Friday 2:00 PM - 3:29 PM

SYNOPSIS: In summer, Nagisa, a woman from the city, and Natsuo, a young man visiting his relatives, meet by the sea. Their vacant gazes reflect each other as they exchange awkward words and wade into the rain-drenched ocean. In winter, Li, a screenwriter in a creative slump, travels to a snow-covered village with an old camera left behind by a late acquaintance. There, she finds a peculiar, desolate guesthouse run by the enigmatic Benzo. Their conversations rarely connect, yet they set off on an unexpected adventure. The works of Yoshiharu Tsuge, blending melancholy with quiet resilience, have earned worldwide acclaim and continue to resonate across generations. Now, Sho Miyake—one of the leading voices in contemporary Japanese cinema—brings Tsuge’s world to the screen with a delicate balance of fable-like storytelling and modern sensibilities. Through striking landscapes, fleeting encounters, inexplicable moments of oddity, and a cast of endearing characters, the film humorously captures the primal joys of journey and the quiet absurdity of being human.

DIRECTOR: Sho Miyake | LANGUAGE: Japanese

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 89 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Japan | GENRE: Drama - Art

SHOWTIME: Friday 12:30 PM - 1:32 PM

SYNOPSIS: Big ideas often come in small packages. This collection of narrative short films brings together emerging and established filmmakers from across Asia and the Asian diaspora, each offering a distinct perspective on identity, family, love, loss, ambition, and the unexpected moments that shape our lives. Spanning a range of genres, styles, and cultures, these stories transport audiences across borders while revealing the emotions and experiences that connect us all. Whether intimate, humorous, suspenseful, or quietly profound, each film demonstrates the unique power of short-form storytelling: to surprise, challenge, and linger long after the credits roll.

RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes | COLOR

SHOWTIME: Thursday 6:45 PM - 8:47 PM

SYNOPSIS: A high-octane, claustrophobic action-horror ride from the director of Train to Busan. When a genius biologist intentionally unleashes a rapidly mutating, unknown viral outbreak inside downtown Seoul’s 33-story Doongwoori Building, the entire high-rise is sealed off, trapping everyone inside. Unlike traditional zombies driven purely by basic instincts, these infected beings continuously develop, communicate, and execute coordinated tactical attacks through an evolving hive-mind collective consciousness. To survive the night, a resilient biotechnology professor, Kwon Se-jeong, must step up to lead a fractured group of survivors through a vertical nightmare, fighting their way up toward a rooftop rescue team while navigating the deadly traps laid by the outbreak's creator.

DIRECTOR: Yeon Sang-ho | LANGUAGE: Korean

YEAR: 2026 | RUNNING TIME: 122 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Korea | GENRE: Action - Horror

SHOWTIME: Thursday 4:30 PM - 6:17 PM

SYNOPSIS: An intimate and rebellious coming-of-age youth drama that explores the crushing weight of academic expectations. With only 200 days left before the high-stakes college entrance exams, Jihye is relegated to taking care of an abandoned animal pen as a disciplinary punishment. There, she connects with Jin-hee and a small group of fellow outcast students who feel entirely abandoned by their parents, teachers, and the hyper-competitive school system. Bonding over their shared isolation, the girls form a tight-knit collective dubbed "The Gorals." In a desperate bid to reclaim their autonomy and dignity, they abandon their exams altogether and escape into the rugged wilderness—building an improvised sanctuary to survive on their own terms away from society's relentless pressures.

DIRECTOR: Yoo Jae-wook | LANGUAGE: Korean

YEAR: 2025 | RUNNING TIME: 107 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: Korea | GENRE: Drama - Family

SHOWTIME: Thursday 2:00 PM - 4:01 PM

SYNOPSIS: A bittersweet, era-spanning comedy-drama that unfolds when eighteen-year-old Shiyi discovers the hidden youth diary of his late mother, Dongyu, who died giving birth to him. As he reads through its vibrant pages, he is swept into her past, witnessing her hilarious romantic escapades, enduring friendships, and fierce independence across changing eras. Through her words, Shiyi pieces together the extraordinary woman she was, discovering a profound, unyielding love that stretches across time.

DIRECTOR: Xiao Luxi | LANGUAGE: Chinese (Mandarin)

YEAR: 2026 | RUNNING TIME: 121 minutes | COLOR

COUNTRY: China | GENRE: Drama - Comedy

SHOWTIME: Thursday 12 PM - 1:30 PM

SYNOPSIS: Every great filmmaker starts somewhere. This collection showcases the creativity, curiosity, and bold storytelling of the next generation of Asian and Asian diasporic filmmakers, offering a glimpse into the voices that will shape the future of cinema. Whether drawing from deeply personal reflections or imaginative works of fiction, these student-made films explore a wide range of themes with fresh perspectives and fearless ambition. While the filmmakers may still be honing their craft, their stories are already asking meaningful questions, taking creative risks, and reminding us that compelling cinema has no age requirement.

RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes | COLOR