Vision Asia Competition: Cinemas of Women, Displaced Bodies, and Contested Territories
The 30th edition of the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea (BIFF) reaffirmed its position as an essential node within the contemporary map of international festivals, not only as a platform for premieres, but as a laboratory of trends that redefine Asian and Eurasian cinema. Within this framework, the Vision Asia competition, composed this year of eleven feature films, unfolded a repertoire of representations deeply intertwined with gender, understood both as an aesthetic category and as a political device.
The selection—composed of emerging filmmakers from diverse regions of Asia and Eurasia, with the exception of Korea (which this year presented its productions in the dedicated Vision Korea section, as the long time Vision Asia competition was divided into two strands)—revealed how contemporary Asian cinema is interrogating the place of women, the dynamics between genders, and the ways in which patriarchy permeates politics, intimacy, and social displacement.
The curatorial gesture proved meticulous and coherent: although the aesthetic registers ranged from drama to action and comedy, all the films converged on a shared inquiry—how women’s bodies and dissident subjectivities resist, yield, or reinvent themselves within contexts of oppression and transition.
Underlying Vision Asia 2025 is a deliberate, coherent, political curatorship. The eleven films, from dissimilar geographies, converge in reading the world through the prism of gender. Some reveal the fragility of masculinity as a social construction; others expose the historic oppression of women and the potency of their resistances. In all of them, the body becomes an archive of tensions: a space where violence is inscribed, but also a territory from which distinct futures can be imagined.
By consecrating this curatorship, Busan reaffirms itself as a showcase of novelties, and so, as a critical platform able to dispute the male and Eurocentric hegemony of the global festival circuit.
The Triumph of On Your Lap (Indonesia / Saudi Arabia)
On Your Lap (Pangku) marks the ambitious feature directorial debut of Indonesian actor Reza Rahadian, whose intimate yet politically charged drama emerged as the dominant film at the 30th Busan International Film Festival’s Vision Awards, securing no fewer than four major prizes including the KB Vision Audience Award, the FIPRESCI Award, the Bishkek International Film Festival’s Central Asia Cinema Award, and the Face of the Future Award.
Reza Rahadian’s first work as a director places an apparently simple gesture at its center: Set against the backdrop of Indonesia’s 1998 economic crisis, the film centers on Sartika, a pregnant young woman working as a kopi pangku waitress—a role that involves literally sitting on men’s laps as they drink coffee, a practice laden with complex social and gendered implications. Through this intimate lens, Rahadian exposes the raw intersections between livelihood and female embodiment illustrating how patriarchy permeates even the most quotidian and ostensibly private domains.
Rahadian’s cinematic approach is marked by formal austerity and narrative subtlety. The camera’s lingering attention on small gestures—the shift of weight from lap to lap, the measured silences, the restrained facial expressions—renders visibility to the oppressive textures of domestic and social life for women in a deeply patriarchal yet changing Indonesian context. This is not a melodrama of victimhood but a nuanced exploration of survival strategies, where Sartika embodies both vulnerability and quiet resilience.
Importantly, On Your Lap grants the female protagonist narrative authority. The film disrupts typical gender hierarchies not by grand heroic gestures but through the careful orchestration of time around her subjectivity. Sartika’s gaze, her pauses, and her bodily rhythms become the organizing principle of the story, challenging dominant frameworks that marginalize women’s experiences or reduce them to mere symbolism. This narrative and visual strategy aligns with contemporary feminist cinematic concerns that interrogate power and agency within domestic spaces.
The titular image—the lap—functions as a potent metaphor for the entanglement of care and constraint, intimacy and control. It symbolizes a site of tension where affection intersects with subjugation. In this way, Rahadian’s film eloquently captures the complex negotiations of gendered bodies situated at the crossroads of economic precarity.
By awarding On Your Lap multiple honors, Busan recognized an accomplished debut and also underscored Southeast Asian cinema’s vital role in advancing cinematic narratives that confront gendered policies of space, body, and affect with subtle power. Rahadian’s film takes the intimate as its battleground and invites viewers to witness how quiet acts of negotiation and endurance speak volumes about the invisible wars waged within homes and societies.
Sofia Ferrero Cárrega
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025