Japan’s Film Festival Diplomacy in Cold War Asia

The creation of the Southeast Asian Film Festival in 1954 was enabled mostly by the success of Nagata Masaichi of Daiei Studios and can be seen as a site where postcolonial and Cold War impulses intersected and informed each other. While Japan led this non-Communist bloc of “free” Asian film-producing nations technologically and economically, the allure of Japanese aid was tempered by the historical reality of its colonial occupation of these territories only years before. Japanese film discourse illuminated these complex and often contradictory attitudes while questioning the ideological and aesthetic motivations for participation on both sides. Film festivals themselves became sites of resistance as developing Asian cinemas effectively learned to challenge Japan’s dominance and authority precisely by adapting their own models and through coproductions. By the 1960s Japanese dominance over the festival had waned at the same time that ideologically alternative festivals such as the Soviet-backed Afro-Asian Film Festival emerged, providing a space of resistance against the festival in the region.