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.
