East Asian cinema

East Asian cinema is cinema produced in East Asia or produced by people from this region. It is part of Asian cinema, which in turn is part of world cinema. World cinema is used in the English-speaking world to refer to all foreign language films.

The most significant film industries categorizable as East Asian cinema are the industries of China, Hong Kong and Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Other countries include Mongolia, Vietnam, Singapore, North Korea and Macau. The largest markets in East Asia are China, Japan and South Korea.

The terms 'Far Eastern cinema', 'Asian cinema', 'Eastern cinema' or 'Oriental cinema' are sometimes used synonymously with East Asian cinema, particularly in the United States, although their broader scope means that Asian cinema could equally well apply to the movies produced in other parts of Asia, particularly the cinema of India including the enormous Bollywood film industry.

The scope of East Asian cinema is huge and covers a wide array of different film styles and genres. However, East Asian cinema shares a common cultural background and is particularly famous in the West for:

Unlike the European film industries, the East Asian industries were not dominated by American distributors, and developed in relative isolation from Hollywood cinema; while Hollywood films were screened in East Asian countries, they were less popular than home-grown fare with local audiences. Thus, several distinctive genres and styles developed.

East Asian cinema has - to widely varying degrees nationally - had a global audience since at least the 1950s. At the beginning of the decade, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu both captured prizes at the Venice Film Festival and elsewhere, and by the middle of the decade Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell and the first part of Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai Trilogy had won Oscars. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai became a global success; Japanese cinema had burst into international consciousness.

...
Wikipedia