In this paper I will trace a brief history of major Asian film festivals to understand how the notion of ‘Asianness’ evolved over time and how it is expressed nowadays through programming practices and film markets. Then I will focus on the case study of the Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) as a problematic site where cultural and economic dynamics converge. As an A-category festival, TIFF has to balance its international status with regional relevance, negotiating ‘Asianness’ in a complex relationship involving the local film industry, since questions on ‘Asian cinema’ are deeply linked to the national. Finally, I will draw some conclusions, discussing how TIFF relates to other major film festivals in Asia, where ‘Asianness’ has been used as a shared effort to distinguish themselves from the paradigm set by European film festivals. However, this is an ongoing process, TIFF struggles to use ‘Asianness’ as a unifying element and the specific interests of each festival obstruct the possibility to create a more systematic trans-Asian model.
In recent years, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has furnished source material for two major Asian film directors: Darezhan Omirbaev (Student [2012]) and Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History [2013]). Each director adapts Dostoevsky’s critique of the newly emerging market economy in 1860s Russia in order to depict the impact of capitalism on postcolonial Asian societies, highlighting the alienation characters experience from themselves and in relation to other human beings in particular. In doing so, Omirbaev and Diaz recreate and transfer the novelist’s opposition between native, eastern, Russian Orthodox values and encroaching western ideas to their own countries. Omirbaev depicts the damage caused to ordinary Kazakhs by a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ economic model; Diaz chronicles the merciless toll of capitalism on the rural Filipino poor. Like Dostoevsky, each director proposes a return to native cultural, linguistic and environmental elements as a means of countering harmful foreign ideologies that victimize everyday people.
This introductory chapter sets out the book’s unique regional focus that distinguishes its approach from scholarly works that have regarded Asian cinema predominantly from a national cinema perspective. The chapter outlines the book’s innovative methodology derived from comparative film studies and inter-Asia cultural studies approaches.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, this epilogue considers the future of regional Asian cinema. It develops a notion of regional intimacy, manifest in the interplay between new localisms and inter-nationalisms, to explore how Asian cinema might be understood and re-configured post-pandemic.
This chapter examines how the short format film contributes to the formation of queer Asian cinema as a category that incorporates the efforts of women filmmakers. It pays attention to how unique qualities of the short film allow women filmmakers to actively engage with each other’s work within and across the region, and how this transnational connection is redefining how we might come to understand the figure of the individual ‘auteur’ of Asian cinema.
Speaking Nations, Edge Ways - Reviews of 'Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound and Stability' by Gerald Sim, Amsterdam University Press, 2020; and 'Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945 – 1998)' edited by Gaik Cheng Khoo, Thomas Barker, and Mary Ainslie, Amsterdam University Press, 2020
