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Infernal Affairs has received journalistic, popular and corporate notice but little vigorous critical attention. This book explores the way this example of Hong Kong's cinematic eclecticism has crossed borders as a story, a commercial product and a work of art; and has had an undeniable impact on current Hong Kong cinema. Moreover the author uses this film to highlight the way Hong Kong cinema continues to be inextricably intertwined with global film culture and the transnational movie market.

The pioneering independent filmmaker Ann On-wah Hui has drawn much acclaim for her sensitive portrayals of numerous Hong Kong tragedies and marginalized populations. In a career spanning three decades, Hui has been director, producer, writer, and actress for more than thirty films. This work analyzes a 1990 film considered by many to be one of Hui's most haunting and poignant works, Song of the Exile. The semi-autobiographical film depicts a daughter's coming to terms with her mother's Japanese identity. Themes of cross-cultural alienation, divided loyalties, and generational reconciliation resonated strongly amid the migration and displacement pressures surrounding Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Even now, more than a decade after the 1997 Handover, the film is a perennial favorite among returning Hong Kong emigrants and international cinema students alike.

In coming decades, film will be one of the primary ways in which China adopts and expands ecological consciousness. This anthology is a book-length study of China's ecosystem through the lens of cinema, in an historic moment of unparalleled environmental crises and destruction. Proposing “ecocinema” as a new critical framework, the volume collectively investigates a wide range of urgent topics in today's world: Chinese and Western epistemes of nature and humanity; socialist modernization amid capitalist globalization; shifting configurations of space, locale, cityscape, and natural landscape; gender, religion, and ethnic cultures; as well as bioethics and environmental politics. Individual chapters zero in on diverse Chinese-language films by directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Jia Zhangke, Lou Ye, Fruit Chan, Wu Tianming, Tsai Ming-liang, Li Yang, Feng Xiaogang, Zhang Yang, Wang Xiaoshuai, Wang Bing, Ning Hao, Zhang Ming, Dai Sijie, Wanma Caidan, and Huo Jianqi.

Cinema has been a primary mechanism for entertaining migrants to the modern city, recording and displaying a historically new experience to urban populations themselves, while also disseminating the city's promise around the world. But recent city films betray an awareness that the experience of urban life has changed with the dynamic energies and burdens of globalization, with the era of digital video now upon us, and with the emergence of almost limitless megacities throughout East Asia. Contemporary films from the region help define the urban experience in these new environments. This book traces common concerns among East Asian cinemas of Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the PRC, and Taiwan, and go beyond the now familiar notion that the Asian metropolises are successful iterations of local identity within a global network.

One of the most prominent directors in Hong Kong at the moment, Johnnie To Kei-fung, has over the past few years been receiving more attention at film festivals globally with films such as Breaking News (2004), Election I & II (2005–2006), Exiled (2006), The Mad Detective (2007), and most recently, Sparrow (2008). Sometimes referred to as the post-1997 poet of Hong Kong, To has a career that actually goes back as far as the 1980s, and as one of the few directors to keep up a high output even after the local film industry started to decline, his CV now boasts close to 50 films. Writing a monograph on To is therefore no easy task, but this book provides an overview of Johnnie To's career, concentrating on his action films, the genre in which To has excelled. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between directory and genre, why To is regarded as an auteur, and the influence he has on the trajectory of the action genre in the Hong Kong cinema. The author's view is that To's idiosyncratic auteurist style transforms the generic conventions under which he is compelled to work.

This book is about Fruit Chan's film Made in Hong Kong (1997), a tragic coming-of-age story which follows three disillusioned local youths struggling to navigate Hong Kong public housing projects and late adolescence amid violent crime, gang pressure, and broken homes. Shot on a very low budget, the film marked the beginning of Chan's career as an independent film director.

Global connections and screen innovations converge in Hong Kong cinema. This volume focuses on the film clubs of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as well as new waves since, that have both refreshed and ruptured Hong Kong screenscapes. Energized by transnational image and human flows from China and Asia, Hong Kong's commercial filmmakers and independent pioneers have actively challenged established genres and narrative conventions to create a cultural space independent of Hollywood. The circulation of Hong Kong films through art house and film festival circuits, as well as independent DVDs, galleries, and internet sites, reveals many differences within global cultural distributions, as well as distinctive tensions between experimental media artists and traditional screen architects, social participation, censorship, and flexible citizenship.

This book compares production and consumption of Asian horror cinemas in different national contexts and their multidirectional dialogues with Hollywood and neighboring Asian cultures. Chapters highlight common themes including technology, digital media, adolescent audience sensibilities, transnational co-productions, pan-Asian marketing techniques, and variations on good vs. evil evident.

Japan's film industry has gone through dramatic changes in recent decades, as international consumer forces and transnational talent have brought unprecedented engagement with global trends. With careful research and unique first-person observations drawn from years of working within the international industry of Japanese film, this book aims to examine how different generations of Japanese filmmakers engaged and interacted with the structural opportunities and limitations posed by external forces, and how their subjectivity has been shaped by their transnational experiences and has changed as a result. Having been through the globalization of the last part of the twentieth century, are Japanese themselves and overseas consumers of Japanese culture really becoming more cosmopolitan? If so, what does this mean for Japan's national culture and the traditional sense of national belonging among Japanese people?

This book tells the story of the “Emperor of Film”, who dominated the golden age of Chinese silent movies. Jin Yan achieved his greatest stardom in the 1930s, when women literally threw themselves at his feet. Married first to the Chinese actress Wang Renmei, his movie roles with “the Goddess” Ruan Ling-yu spurred public demand for more of them together in films made by the leading studio, Lianhua. It was Jin who made Ruan aware of film's awesome power to portray social problems while evading the censors with melodramatic soap opera formats. Jin's life spanned the most turbulent period in modern Chinese history — a childhood escape from Japanese-occupied Korea, through the long civil war, the bitter Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's reformation. Jin's embodiment of the modernizing May Fourth ideals of the 1920s and 30s added a new layer of sexuality to the liberal movement, but the Communists later cast Jin aside in their campaign to “learn from Lei Feng”, a humble young soldier. As Jin's second wife Qin Yi rose to new heights in the politically charged film world, the sick and aging star languished in obscurity. This book reproduces dozens of stills from the personal collection of Qin Yi and the China Film Archive, and contextualizes Jin's tragic transformation with details on many fellow performers.