Seoul  - First Asia, then the world.

This is the message emerging from the 14th annual Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), which opened Thursday and runs until October 16 in the South Korean port city of Pusan.

"Among film programmers I know, PIFF is considered the film festival to attend," said Alissa Simon, an American programmer who serves on one of the festival's juries.

"I have watched PIFF develop and grow since it was first started and have been impressed by the way they quickly combined all aspects of what a festival should be - discovery, retrospective, market, support for new directors, and so on - to make them the leading festival in Asia."

One of Asia's largest and most prestigious film festivals, this year's event keeps its focus on its home continent, but also introduces categories and collaborations to expand its reach to the rest of the world.

"We are screening a record-breaking number of films this year - 355 or so - and I can say that the festival is kind of a mainstay for some Asian films, which go international after visiting Pusan," said Cindy Jayoung Kang, a press coordinator for the festival.

A total of 96 European films are to be screened in different sections.

Highlights include Flash Forward, a new competitive category that aims to find talents outside Asia; Wide Angle, a programme for short films and documentaries and Midnight Passion, a slot featuring late-night screenings.

A special section is dedicated to Italian horror master Dario Argento and there is the Gala Presentation of I Am Love (Io Sono L'amore) directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Tilda Swinton.

Among the roughly 200,000 movie fans expected to visit Pusan, Asians will far outnumber Westerners, Kang said. "But we're inviting more Westeners compared to previous years, and we're promoting collaboration between Asian and Western filmmakers."

The most notable example of such promotion is the first workshop to be held at PIFF by European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs, a leading training, development and networking programme for producers in Europe.

The two-day workshop is a collaborative effort with PIFF and Italy's Udine Far East Film Festival. Sessions will examine the European market, co-productions between Asia and Europe and a script and structural analysis of Oldboy, a 2003 film by Korean director Park Chan Wook.

"Such a festival initiative is a great opportunity for interaction," said Dorothee Wenner, a German filmmaker who is a juror for PIFF, as well as a programmer for the Berlin International Film Festival and a consultant for the Dubai International Film Festival.

"It sounds so easy to get an international co-production off the ground, but so much depends on whether you click with another person. Making a film is completely different from, say, building a car."

Initiatives such as the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP) and Asian Film Market have offered Asian filmmakers a chance to network, find investors and co-producers and sell their films overseas, making the business side of movies another draw for visitors.

"The PPP incubates new arthouse projects and introduces them to the international circuit," said B Won Lee, chair of the international committee for the Producers Guild of Korea.

Finding partners in the Asian market is a big draw for filmmakers such as German director Anno Saul. Premiering his film The Door, Saul hopes to tap into local markets, as he did with his 2006 film Where is Fred?, which he sold to China.

"There's a big market at Pusan, and the people selling my movie made a strategy for me to go there," Saul said, speaking from Berlin before his trip to the festival.

In addition to absorbing overseas films, local attendees at the Pusan festival hope to also project their own messages around the globe.

"PIFF is a window into the Asian film world," Lee said. "The films here are selected because they concern the new face of emerging directors, and they allow guests to fully understand Asian culture." (dpa)