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The Busan International Film Festival office has confirmed the lineup of judges who will decide this year's competition winners. Chair Zhang Yimou made his name on the world stage early in his career, and his filmography includes top prizes from all three major European festivals. His task now: assess the 13 films vying for honors in competition.

The jury draws evenly from across Asia's film industry. Chinese director Bi Gan previously won an arts prize for an earlier work, Kazakh actress Samal Yeslyamova holds a Cannes Best Actress win, and Japanese director Ishikawa Kei has swept multiple categories at Japan's Academy Awards.

Two Korean figures round out the panel. Director Jung Joo-ri has an unusual distinction: every film she's made, from her feature debut through new release 'Dora,' has been invited to Cannes. Choi Hee-seo has built a career spanning acting, short-film directing, and producing, including a film she produced that's screening this year. Vietnamese producer Tran Thi Bich Ngoc, who runs a program discovering emerging Southeast Asian filmmakers, completes the lineup.

Organizers say the mix of directors, actors, and a producer is what defines this jury. The Busan Award they'll decide is split into five categories including the grand prize, with total prize money in the hundreds of millions of won (roughly $81,000). The competition section, which launched last year, is now in its second edition as part of the festival's 31st edition overall.

The festival itself opens in early October and runs about ten days around the Busan Cinema Center. After a smooth debut year for the competition section, there's a sense among observers that this year's lineup has stepped up in quality.

The documentary chronicles the year Lisa spent stepping away from group activities to go solo. Director Sue Kim frames the film around two threads: her affection for the bandmates she's spent a decade with, and the weight of forging a new path on her own.

Back when she was still a teenage trainee, a video of BLACKPINK's members rapping along to a song and using a racial slur spread online, sparking intense backlash. Addressing it now, Lisa said she grew up in Thailand and never had the chance to learn that cultural context, apologizing and saying she's since become fully aware and won't repeat it.

The person who leaked the clip reportedly kept sending her threats implying violence. The documentary shows Lisa and her team wanting to address the controversy directly, only for their label to hold them back. The timing made it worse — it happened right before her first solo performance at Coachella, and she recalled wanting to focus purely on the show but struggling to do so.

Scouted at 13 as YG Entertainment's first foreign trainee out of a pool with odds in the thousands-to-one range, she says most of her personal life was controlled throughout her teenage years, leaving little room to express her own feelings. She described curfews and location check-ins at the dorm, along with bans on drinking, dating, getting a driver's license, or going out freely, and said she had to watch fellow trainees get cut during monthly evaluations.

She said she hopes to start a family someday and wants fans to see her as a person, not just a figure on stage. While she believes her BLACKPINK bandmates need breaks just as she did, she stressed the group will keep performing together even as they get older. She's been picking up the pace on her solo career, launching her own label, signing with a major record company, and branching into acting.

Cyber crime investigators in Gyeonggi Province's northern district have wrapped up their case against a man in his 30s who ran a long-running ticket resale operation, and he's now headed to trial. Investigators found he had no other job and lived off ticket reselling alone, a hustle that ran for more than seven years, from around fall 2018 until this past spring. To keep up appearances, he'd even registered a legitimate e-commerce business.

His method: run bot software to snap up tickets the moment sales opened, then split the haul across seven accounts registered to himself, family members, and relatives. Once he had the tickets, he'd hand off wristbands in person on show day, change the shipping address to the buyer's, or simply transfer the booking account itself.

Prices varied wildly by event. Tickets for a 2019 BTS concert in Jamsil that listed for 110,000 won ($83) sold for as much as 3 million won ($2,260). Tickets for a Stray Kids show last year priced at 165,000 won went for 2 million won. Seventeen fan-meeting tickets jumped from 110,000 won to 1.8 million won, and tickets to Bruno Mars's 2023 Korea concert, originally around 250,000 won, changed hands for nearly five times that.

The man reportedly traded tips and recruited accomplices through what was once the country's largest online chatroom for ticket scalping — since shut down. When news broke in March that police had rounded up a large scalping ring, he cut ties immediately and wiped his computer and phone, even asking an AI chatbot about the state of the police investigation. But police were already working the case through that same chatroom, and forensic evidence recovered from a USB drive during a raid was enough to prove the full scope of his operation.

During questioning, the man claimed he didn't know the reselling was illegal and said he'd paid his taxes properly. The court disagreed, finding the charges well-substantiated enough to issue an arrest warrant. Police determined he pocketed roughly two-thirds of his sales as actual profit and used the money to buy an apartment and two commercial properties. By the time he was caught, he'd already sold the apartment, but police placed the remaining commercial properties and bank deposits under an asset freeze ahead of trial.

This tour was built around BIGBANG's 20th anniversary as a group. Filling one of the biggest stadiums in the US with fans decades into their career, observers say, is fresh proof that the group's overseas fandom hasn't lost a step.

The show opened with pyrotechnics and a high-energy track, and the crowd's energy carried through the rest of the setlist. Between the jumbotron visuals, lighting design and fireworks, fans and critics alike called it a tightly produced, arena-tour-caliber production.

After wrapping the US dates, the members head straight to Europe to continue the tour. Cities that weren't originally on the schedule have since been added thanks to fan demand, expanding the tour's overall footprint across multiple continents.

Meanwhile, T.O.P — who's now on his own path outside the group — brought up his former bandmates in a recently released interview with Japanese broadcasters. He said that while he won't be sharing a stage with them, he'll keep watching and cheering for their activities, and also talked about restarting his own career with a new album and solo tour after time away.

Formed in 2006, BIGBANG has long been regarded as one of the defining groups of its era thanks to a string of hit singles. This tour has become an occasion to revisit that 20-year run.

Actress Ahn Eun-jin sat down for a look back at her career on a YouTube variety show. When the host guessed she'd shot around 20 commercials after her breakout drama aired, Ahn stunned the studio by correcting him — the real number, she said, was 45.

She credited her role as an OB-GYN resident in the show with putting her face and name firmly on the map. Before landing the part, she said, every audition felt like it all came down to that one performance in the room. Once she had a hit under her belt, she said, that pressure eased — she finally had proof of what she could do.

Ahn said the character was confident and magnetic, and that viewers seeing themselves in that portrayal is what won her so much love. She joked that she's still riding that image today, years later.

Ahn got her start on the musical stage before building a reputation for solid performances across several projects, and the drama sent her mainstream recognition into overdrive. She went on to land her first leading TV role and kept booking lead parts afterward, cementing her place as a top-tier actress. She's now back on primetime with a new drama.