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As the first inter-Asian film organisation in the region, the Federation of Motion Picture Producer’s Association in Southeast Asia (FPA) began in 1953 under the passionate leadership of Japanese film executive Nagata Masaichi, president of Daiei studio in Japan. A year later, the FPA’s annual event, Southeast Asian Film Festival was held in Tokyo on May 8, 1954. The FPA was for at least its first two decades the single most important pan-Asian film industry organisation. Its annual event, the Southeast Asian Film Festival (renamed Asian Film Festival in 1956), was unique that it was hosted in neither a single city nor a single country. Instead, this film festival adopted a peripatetic system that moved it from country to country each year; no member country was allowed to accommodate the festival in two consecutive years. From the beginning, then, the Southeast Asian Film Festival was not a conventional film festival, but rather a regional alliance summit for the region’s film executives, accompanied by screenings of each participant’s annual outputs, a series of forums, and film equipment fairs and exhibitions.

Despite their historical significance, however, the FPA and its annual film festival have not received the scrutiny they deserve. Likewise, film festival studies in Asia, particularly of the pre-1990s period, have yielded few results. This is partly because the festivals do not fit comfortably within the rigid borders of national cinema studies; furthermore, film festivals in Asia are still a new field of inquiry. Indeed, the Asia Film Festival, the FPA, and other equally important festivals and regional organisations in this period were seldom bound to a single nation. Most of them were regionally constructed entities, closely tied to non-governmental organisations and/or the cultural policies of postwar US hegemony. In view of this situation, this project will be the first attempt to renew this forgotten history of film festivals in Asia, and it will also reveal an important piece in the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War.

This research seminar will be presented by Sangjoon Lee, an Assistant Professor of Asian cinema at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University.

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