A Busan native's guide to what to see, do and eat in film capital of South Korea

WITH PHOTO GALLERY: Fish cakes, photography, soju, strolling on the beach or a history walk - there's plenty to do in Busan whether you're there for its international film festival or not

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Published: 3:15pm, 16 Sep 2015Updated: 2:18pm, 18 Sep 2015

If you arrive in the port city of Busan a few days before its annual film festival kicks off, you can find yourself pretty much alone down on Haeundae beach – no mean feat considering at the height of summer an estimated 100,000 people take up every grain of sand, every single day, along just 1.6 kilometres of foreshore here.

You can sit for a while and watch the waves slowly roll in from the Sea of Japan and then you can fix your attention to the transformation slowly taking place as Haeundae is turned from a haven for sunseekers to a hub for cineastes. At the start of every October the beach becomes a hive of activity once again during the annual Busan International Film Festival (biff.kr), arguably the most important event of its kind in Asia and one which this year is celebrating its 20th edition from October 1 to 10.

The massive posters erected along Haeundaehaebyeon-ro herald some of the around 300 films which will screen in the 10 days of BIFF, an event which annually attracts an international line-up – names such as Quentin Tarantino, Aishwarya Rai and Zhang Ziyi – while also championing the cause of independent Asian cinema.