Cinema in Asia has been dominated primarily by Japan, India, and China, but many players in the industry punch above their weight. Japan integrated benshi (live narrators) into silent films, while India’s first feature, Raja Harishchandra (1913), laid the groundwork for a cinema steeped in indigenous mythology and music. By the mid-20th century, post-war reconstruction and independence movements sparked parallel “Golden Ages” across the continent.

In Japan, masters like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujirō Ozu revolutionised global film grammar, with Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) introducing non-linear storytelling to the West. Simultaneously, India’s parallel cinema movement, spearheaded by Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy, offered poetic, humanist realism, while the commercial Hindi film industry (later Bollywood) solidified its formula of melodrama, music, and social consciousness. In China, the pre-communist Shanghai film industry flourished, creating sophisticated social dramas that would later split into distinct cinematic lineages in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland.

The latter half of the 20th century saw radical political shifts that birthed explosive “New Wave” movements. In the 1960s, the Japanese New Wave tackled taboo youth countercultures and political disillusionment with aggressive avant-garde styles. By the late 1970s and 1980s, the focus shifted to Hong Kong and Taiwan. Hong Kong cinema became a global juggernaut by reinventing martial arts and action cinema, evolving from the classic wuxia and Bruce Lee films into the kinetic “heroic bloodshed” styles of John Woo and the lush, melancholic arthouse romances of Wong Kar-wai. In Taiwan, directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang forged the Taiwan New Cinema, utilising long takes and minimalist realism to interrogate national identity and historical trauma. Meanwhile, Mainland China’s “Fifth Generation” filmmakers, including Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, emerged from the Cultural Revolution to create visually opulent, politically daring epics like Farewell My Concubine (1993) that captured international festival top prizes.

Nowadays, Asian cinema has broken free from the typical limits it’s faced. It’s no longer just a domestic project or an arthouse thing. It has become a dominant force in global pop culture. South Korea spearheaded this modern renaissance; the South Korean New Wave combined sharp socio-political critique with high-production thrillers, culminating in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), making history as the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, alongside the global cultural footprint of Park Chan-wook. Japan expanded its global empire through anime, with Studio Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki securing a permanent place in the international canon.

With China’s massive domestic commercial market producing record-breaking blockbusters, the continued global streaming proliferation of Indian cinema (exemplified by the crossover success of RRR), and a rising wave of independent, critically acclaimed voices from Southeast Asia, it seems Asia is the place to be in cinema.