The Asian film industry has made a strong showing at the Cannes Film Festival this year as the region’s burgeoning industry has helped film-makers discover new opportunities.
The premieres of movies from Taiwan’s grandmaster Hou Hsiao-Hsien, China’s leading director Jia Zhangke and Japan’s Hirokazu Koreeda in the last few days mark a big change from a few years ago when Asian films seemed to be disappearing from the main competitions of the world’s leading festivals.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Asian films regularly grabbed top spots at A-list film festivals as directors were catapulted onto the world film stage as part of the region’s new wave cinema.
However, last year there was only one Asian movie vying for top honours in Cannes.
Helping to drive the change has been China, which has emerged as a major global motion picture powerhouse, transforming itself into the world’s second-biggest film market and forging a booming co-production financing industry.
China’s growing role in film-making has lead to big-budget business deals between its film studios and movie moguls from across Asia and as far afield as Hollywood.
The prominence given to Hou, Jia and Koreeda in Cannes this year have helped the Asian film business to build on its success at last year’s Berlin Film Festival when the industry scooped up major prizes.
Chinese director Diao Yinan’s thriller Black Coal, Thin Ice (Bai Ri Yan Huo) not only won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear for best picture in 2014 but the movie’s star, Liao Fan, also won the festival’s best actor award.
Altogether four Asian directors were included in Berlin’s main competition in 2014.
South Korea and Japan have also stepped up their efforts at mounting international co-productions with both countries forging deals to finance films across the region. This includes a slew of agreements with China, with whom both nations have had difficult relations in the past.
The result is that there are currently almost 20 Chinese-Korean co-productions in the pipeline, which are set to be released this year or in 2016.
One unexpected spinoff of the burgeoning pan-Asian film and TV drama business has been the role they have played in smoothing over the long-established tensions that have dogged the region’s contentious history.
South Korean TV dramas and films have turned Korean actors such as Kim Soo-hyun and Park Shin-Hye into big stars in China. There is even a Chinese-Korean boy band called Exo.
But one prime example of how the film industry has helped to reshape geopolitical ties has been the new lines of communications that have been opened between Taiwan and mainland China.
Many movie professionals, from scriptwriters to directors and cinematographers, have left Taiwan to work in China where the film business is desperately looking for their skills.
