The emergence of the Asian Film Festival : Cold War Asia and Japan’s reentrance to the regional film industry in the 1950s

As the first inter-Asian film organization in the region, the Federation of Motion Picture Producer’s Association of Asia (FPA) began in 1953 under the passionate leadership of Nagata Masaichi, president of Daiei studio in Japan. A year later, FPA’s annual event, the Asian Film Festival, was held in Tokyo. The festival was not a conventional film festival but a regional alliance summit for film executives of “free Asia,” which accompanied the screenings of each participant’s annual outputs, a series of forums, and film equipment fairs and exhibitions. This article delineates the cultural, economic, and political logic(s) that gave rise to and modified the Asian Film Festival by arguing that the history of the festival, at least its first five years, resulted from the U.S.-driven Cold War politics that enunciated the new map of “free Asia,” an anticommunist bloc that was controlled by a new hegemonic regime, America.