By the late 1960s, India’s economic aspirations seemed to be crumbling, indicating the decline of the Nehruvian utopia. This period marked a pivotal moment, influencing the emergence of a new social realist genre. In 1960, Shri B. V. Keskar, the information and broadcasting minister, purchased the property of Prabhat Studio and established the Film Institute in India, which later on became popular as the Film and Television Institute of India. From the beginning, the film institute was led by a group of experts. Eminent filmmakers and alumni of the Film Institute, such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, John Abraham and others, acknowledged Ritwik Ghatak, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, George Sadoul, Werner Herzog and Alexander Kluge as real inspirations in their student lives. By using memoirs, interviews, archival documents and government reports, this article envisages how the pedagogy of the Film Institute of India encouraged a group of young filmmakers to experiment with film theory and praxis, serving as a stepping stone towards a new cinema movement in the 1970s.

Barbara Creed’s concept of the ‘monstrous feminine’ illustrates a natural ‘affinity’ between woman and monster within horror, recognizing both for the potential dangers they are seen to pose to patriarchal society. Although when writing, Creed was referring to western horror cinema, the same theories can be extended to Japanese films. Today, no Japanese horror film is considered complete without its haunting woman spectre, the female onryō or ‘vengeful ghost’ archetype, a trend which dates back from the time of Shindō Kaneto (1912–2012) to the latest film of the Ringu franchise released in 2022. Despite changes in Japanese sociocultural norms over time, the way these vengeful female characters are presented remains arguably consistent, positioning them as more ‘monsters’ and ‘freaks’ rather than women with whom the audience can sympathize. More significant is the trend of visually associating the female onryō with feminine physical traits or behaviour and transforming her into something grotesque. While she is typically depicted as ‘monstrous’ through physical disfigurement or distortion of her body or face, her hair is often shown to be what fully embodies her vengeful spirit. Not only is this association of ‘horror’ with hair distinctly feminine and rarely if ever attributed to similarly ‘monstrous’ male characters, but in recent Japanese horror films, the female onryō ’s hair is also seen disembodied, sometimes even moving of its own accord. Lacking the presence of an explicit female body, this hair of the female onryō can arguably be seen as belonging to any woman, thereby extending the association of horror to the Japanese woman herself.

This article reassesses Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box (1997) a quarter century after the film’s production with a focus on ‘transition’. It aims to ‘recover’ Chinese Box on different levels, arguing that this complex film is an important historical artefact from the handover period of Hong Kong and a clear film d’auteur to which the director’s vision is the key. In contrast with the cold critical reception of the film at the time of its release, this article posits that Chinese Box is an accomplished work of transnational cinema that, merging fiction and documentary, constitutes a powerful personal reflection on Hong Kong and its diverse communities in a time of flux.

The year 2023 marked the 25th anniversary of the theatrical release of Silat Legenda in cinemas: it was the first animation feature film (in the Malay language) ever made in Malaysia when it was screened in 1998. With a production cost of about RM 5 million (approximately USD 1.2 million), the film was however a box-office flop and did not break even; one film review considered that its animators were ‘not up to mark yet’. In January 2024, the authors talked to Silat Legenda’s director Hassan Muthalib about the film’s production: he reminisced and reflected on his experiences making this milestone film in Malaysian cinema history over a period of three years.

Review of: Studio Ghibli: An Industrial History, Rayna Denison (2023) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 236 pp., ISBN 978-3-03116-846-8, p/bk, GBP 39.99 ISBN 978-3-03116-844-4, e-book, GBP 37.99

Accompanying the increasing immersiveness of cinema in the past two decades, represented by the wide application of 3D technologies, large format screens and experiments with high frame rates, China has developed its own domestic projection technology called Cinity since the late 2010s. This article examines the development of Cinity within the context of China’s global technological film aspirations and its desire to project Chinese films, and Chinese screening technology, to the world. While the uptake of Cinity internationally has been limited, the technology marks one of China’s latest efforts to upgrade its film industry as well as the ongoing nexus of China’s collaboration and competition with Hollywood. The article provides case studies of Ang Lee’s Gemini Man (2019) and Frant Gwo’s The Wandering Earth 2 (2023) to examine the changing trajectories of this technology’s projection before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article examines two contemporary Chinese films that document the filmmakers’ homecoming journey during the Chinese New Year: Sige chuntian (Four Springs) () and Jixiang ruyi (The Reunions) (). It argues that both films have the characteristic of being reflexive documentaries exploring and expanding the boundaries of documentary films. According to Meunier’s three types of filmic identifications – the documentary attitude, the home-movie attitude and the fiction attitude – the two films challenge documentary norms and combine the documentary attitude with the other two types of attitude. Four Springs combines documentary and home movie by closely capturing the four journeys of homecoming confined in the private sphere of the filmmaker’s home, whilst The Reunions combines documentary and fiction, and even actuality and performance, through actor Liu Lu’s portrayal of the director Da Peng’s cousin in the presence of his real family. By challenging these documentary forms, these two films reflect the directors’ uses of documentary to memorialize their personal experiences with their families, more than merely reflecting the cultural phenomenon of the Chinese New Year homecoming.

This article analyses techniques that contemporary South Korean horror films use to depict historical trauma, how these techniques are harnessed to frighten audiences and how different approaches articulate different relationships to the historical traumas that they depict. It analysesGidam(Epitaph) () andGonjiam(Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum) () as case studies for how the articulation of historical trauma operates by showing historical trauma in the former, but by concealing it in the latter. It considers not only how history is referenced on-screen but also how historical consciousness can be felt through the horror genre.

Child protagonists have been relatively uncommon in Korean cinema. This article, however, draws attention to two films from 1965 that both feature child protagonists: Sorrow Even up in Heaven (Kim) and The DMZ (Park). The article’s interest in these two films is twofold, found both in and beyond the diegesis. On a diegetic level, the emphasis on child perspectives plays a crucial function in refraining serious fictional narratives from following an adult’s expected (and melodramatic) narrative development. Such a pattern not only offers a creative glimpse into the world of children but also becomes a means through which filmmakers tactfully avoided the intensifying censorship of 1960s Korea. And yet, the filmmakers’ subtle criticisms of society, though unspoken in the diegesis, are almost osmotically imbued in the highly sociopolitical settings of the narratives. Thus, the resulting juxtaposition (and paradoxical discrepancy) between the settings and the children’s obliviousness become crucial in allowing viewers – at least contemporary ones – to recognize the unspoken social and political issues of the 1960s. Beyond the diegesis, the child is also crucial in having provided an opportunity to capture sensitive environments of the 1960s through its dedication to child perspectives that created a documentary-like realism. Thus, I argue the role of the child in these films to be not only a tool by which artists delicately avoided political criticism in the 1960s but also a vehicle that enabled rare archives into a forgotten past.