Amanda
I attached the word ‘love’ to my interest in film around age 13. Given this was 2019, this meant watching Greta Gerwig and Ari Aster, maybe some Bergman. It absolutely did not mean watching the garish slop on state TV: to make it simpler, then, no Thai films at all.
The stereotypical Thai blockbuster is quick and loud, filmed in markets and temples, with crude sound effects and slapstick humor. To a child brought up in a British curriculum and an anglicised social media landscape, the preferred media of my countryside cousins came to seem exotically poor. I longed to have been brought up on Nickelodeon, pretended to have watched iCarly and Spongebob. Deciding to become a Serious Film Person, the comparative ‘artlessness’ of local cinema became so loud as to discredit an entire region’s output. There is no A24 production with a monk on a motorcycle. In my learned totality, I decided I must prioritise the Western canons of Letterboxd and Twitter.
Gradually, my self-education led me to ‘foreign films’, re-encountering Asian cinema as exotic pearls endorsed by Western, intellectual Cinephiles. The term ‘foreign film’ is itself Western, coined by the Anglophone critic writing of the inherent, regional sensibilities of distant Auteurs. I, like many who absorbed Western language and media without living there, formed opinions about my own culture’s artistic merit second-hand. To internalise that framework was to simultaneously distance myself from the accessibility of regional films gone unreviewed by Western media, and to begin to see Asian art as one great, impenetrable cloud from which only the occasional genius could emerge.
Online film spaces can offer a ‘starter pack’ of films from which it takes a deliberate effort to stray. A film like La Haine remains in the online consciousness because it’s brilliant, yes, but also because it grants a legitimised kind of film cred. This, not your Asian mom’s favourite romcom, is a recognisable claim to ‘getting’ ‘world cinema’. Thus ‘world cinema’ becomes just the sanctioned stuff.
In learning to love film (online), when Foreign Film comes as the ‘next step’ it struggles to establish itself as a part of, rather than alternative category of, film awareness. So long as there remains the notion of inherent Western superiority, the language of proper media appreciation shall trade its references. La Haine becomes a good foreign film, and/or a piece of kino because of its innately different Frenchness.
But isn’t it normal that the films shown everywhere be the most popular, studied, talked about?
The harm, however hyperbolic, is that sensibilities are becoming hegemonic. People learning from a set canon bring to their work not continuous improvements upon an inheritance of unique styles and stories but in the best case a cultural remix a la The Good, the Bad, the Weird, and in the worst a flat transplantation which rejects the origins it came from: see the countless clumsy attempts to recreate an Avengers. A Hollywood standard of ‘bad’ deprives us of films infused with genuine, authentic cultural beliefs and home-grown honesty, however unsophisticated.
“When Foreign Film comes as the “next step” it struggles to establish itself as a part of, rather than alternative category of, film awareness”
I could point to the success of something like K-Pop Demon Hunters and say that audiences are turning eastwards, but equally towards an East that has modelled itself on, and is playing by, Western rules. I suppose I can only mourn that I didn’t realise sooner that I had such a wealth of great cinema around me, all my life. I can also only feel ashamed of a childhood of internalised racism. You feel an incomparable sense of belonging in returning to and re-realising the artistry, depth, and comfort of the films from home. I am wholly in favour of people discovering a passion for film through what is popular, digestible, well-established. I recognise the ‘canon’ will, for a couple decades, remain largely Western. But I wish for more young people in my position to take unabashed pride in the privilege of independent discovery, and to reject any statement that treats ‘foreign film’ as a monolith.
Julia
The Korean drama has become a global phenomenon. In 2022, South Korea exported approximately £465 million worth of television content abroad, an increase of 30% from the previous year. Streaming giant Netflix has further capitalised on this popularity, pledging a record $2.5 billion into Korean production between 2024 and 2027.
What does this explosion of Korean drama mean for the future of Asian TV?
As an Asian international student, I’ve always found refuge in streaming K-dramas from my dorm. Seeing faces that looked like mine, family rituals and shared meals reminded me of the values I’d grown up with, much too easy to lose in Cambridge’s hyper-individualist culture.
Yet when I return home to Manila, surrounded by the everyday sights of my childhood – jeepneys queuing on rainy days, the soybean pudding vendor’s Sunday morning holler and weekly Catholic masses – I reconcile with the glaring absence of Filipino media on global platforms.
“Philippine senator Jinggoy Estrada proposed banning Korean dramas”
Korean dramas have performed excellently among Southeast Asian audiences through their depiction of Confucianist, family-oriented values that are typically absent from Western media. However, due to their governmental and foreign financial backing, the Korean cultural export industry outperforms many Southeast Asian productions, with higher-quality production and depictions of aspirational urban lifestyles that local industries cannot afford to replicate. Although local governments have attempted to increase safeguards for domestic media industries, such as Philippine senator Jinggoy Estrada proposed banning Korean dramas, frustrated with the public’s “lack of support” for local entertainment, and Indonesia and Malaysia’s discussions to screen-time quotas to protect local films, these measures feel futile against the Western backing of Korean media and audiences already converted to Korean production values.
Should Korean media continue to dominate the canon of Asian media, consequences extend from financial domination to cultural monopolisation: we risk flattening the nuances between other Asian states with deceptively similar Korean ones, erasing the unique historical, religious, and colonial roots within each Southeast Asian society. In addition, the constant exposure to industrial hyperdevelopment and capitalistic spending in Seoul and urban East Asian cities contributes to a regional hierarchy of ‘Asian-ness’. The effects of this are two-fold: much of the inequality and the oppressive social costs of rapid development within these states are ignored, while Southeast Asian viewers are implicitly influenced to see their own cultures as inferior. When Korean beauty standards and urban aesthetics become the aspirational default, it’s easy to internalise a form of self-orientalism, where we judge ourselves through the lens of what global markets deem valuable.
“K-dramas cannibalise not only local industries but also the global imagination of what Asian culture is”
K-dramas cannibalise not only local industries but also the global imagination of what Asian culture is. The most popular non-English Netflix shows are predominantly Korean, including Squid Game and All of Us Are Dead. This combination of declining local industries and Netflix’s prioritisation of Korean content creates a singular version of ‘Asia’ packaged for global consumption: sleek Seoul skylines and futuristic cityscapes that are a far cry from the diversity in terrain, lifestyle and rural lifestyles available throughout the continent. With Netflix’s algorithm and American investment dollars determining which Asian content reaches global audiences, Western media companies hold the power to define what ‘Asian’ means to the world.
Today, we find ourselves facing the modern paradox of Asian media: Asian representation has never been more visible, yet most of Asia remains unseen on the silver screen. This isn’t to diminish the artistic merit behind Korean dramas – some of the best and most thought-provoking shows I’ve consumed are from South Korea (highly recommend The Glory and When Life Gives You Tangerines!) – but as viewers, we each hold a responsibility to seek out regional films that broaden our understanding of Asian cinema. We can’t claim to appreciate Asian storytelling while our watchlists are exclusively Korean or from the broader East Asian region; let’s not settle for the singular narratives that global corporations package for profit, but make an effort to explore the rich cinematic history and tradition that Asia has to tell.
