Southeast Asian Film Festival, US Cultural Diplomacy, and the Cold War

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As the first inter-Asian film organization in the region, the Federation of Motion Picture Producer’s Association in Southeast Asia (FPA) began in 1953 under the passionate leadership of Japanese film executive Nagata Masaichi, president of Daiei studio in Japan. A year later, the FPA’s annual event, Southeast Asian Film Festival was held in Tokyo on May 8, 1954. The FPA was for at least its first two decades the single most important pan-Asian film industry organization. Its annual event, the Southeast Asian Film Festival (renamed Asian Film Festival in 1956), was unique that it was hosted in neither a single city nor a single country. Instead, this film festival adopted a peripatetic system that moved it from country to country each year; no member country was allowed to accommodate the festival in two consecutive years. From the beginning, then, the Southeast Asian Film Festival was not a conventional film festival, but rather a regional alliance summit for the region’s film executives, accompanied by screenings of each participant’s annual outputs, a series of forums, and film equipment fairs and exhibitions.

Despite their historical significance, however, the FPA and its annual film festival have not received the scrutiny they deserve. Likewise, film festival studies in Asia, particularly of the pre-1990s period, have yielded few results. This is partly because the festivals do not fit comfortably within the rigid borders of national cinema studies; furthermore, film festivals in Asia are still a new field of inquiry. Indeed, the Asia Film Festival, the FPA, and other equally important festivals and regional organizations in this period were seldom bound to a single nation. Most of them were regionally constructed entities, closely tied to non-governmental organizations and/or the cultural policies of postwar US hegemony. In view of this situation, this project will be the first attempt to resuscitate this forgotten history of film festivals in Asia, and it will also reveal an important piece in the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War.

Sangjoon Lee is an Assistant Professor of Asian cinema at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (Cornell University Press, 2020) and the editor of Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Rediscovering Korean Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2019). He has three guest-edited special issues including “Reorienting Asian Cinema in the Age of the Chinese Film Market (Screen, 2019), “The Chinese Film Industry: Emerging Debates” (Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2019), and “Transmedia and Asian Cinema” (Asian Cinema, 2020). Lee is currently writing a new monograph Border Crossings in Celluloid Asia: South Korea’s Encounter with Sinophone Cinemas and editing two books – Asian Cinema and the Cultural Cold War and The South Korean Film Industry.