Southeast Asian Film Festival: The site of the Cold War cultural struggle

Abstract Southeast Asian Film Festival (AFF), which commenced in 1954, was an annual event co-organized by Japanese and Southeast Asian film industries including Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines during the Cold War. Japanese film studio Daiei initiated AFF. Attempts to study AFF focus on the initiator, that is, Japanese cinema. This article contributes to the current scholarship by adding the participant, Hong Kong cinema. It examines the tensions at AFF between Hong Kong and Japanese cinema and further investigates the co-produced film between the two cinemas facilitated by AFF, Yang Kwei-Fei (Mizoguchi Kenji, 1955). The article conceptualizes AFF and the co-production as a site of cultural struggle. Japanese cinema’s attempts to maintain its hegemony in Asia and Hong Kong cinema’s pursuit of becoming an equal member of world-class film industries constituted this site of cultural struggle. Japan’s idea of consolidating Asia under its leadership was extended from wartime to AFF. On the other hand, Hong Kong cinema promoted an apolitical view of film but with a hint of nationalism in which the nation was indefinite. It adopted from Japanese cinema the ‘technologizing-centric’ idea: technology was key to defining its production standards and catching up with the West during the Cold War.