Asian Cinema: From Classics to the "New Wave" (1950 - 1990). Anton Kozlov

The post-war decades were a period of real explosion for Asian cinema.

Japan produced films that have gone down in history as world cinema: Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. These works opened up Japan to the world and gave the impression that cinema could be not only entertainment but also a deep philosophical conversation.

In Korea, this time is marked by the “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s, when Kim Ki-yeon made The Handmaid’s Tale, a film that is still considered one of the strongest in Korean cinema. Shin San-ok and Yoo Hyun-mok worked at the same time, creating dramas about social trauma and loss under censorship.

In China, cinema has been subject to strict censorship by the Communist Party since the late 1940s. At the turn of the 1980s, the “fifth generation” of directors appeared - Zhang Yimou (“Red Gaoliang”) and Chen Kaige (“Farewell, My Concubine”), who first presented Chinese cinema at festivals in Europe and made it part of the global cultural conversation. It was this generation that took risks - created auteur cinema that was approved by the world, but often criticized by China itself.

At this time, Hong Kong was experiencing its own “golden age”: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and later John Woo laid the foundations of genre cinema, which even influenced Hollywood. At the same time, the first films by Wong Kar-wai appeared, adding poetry and a new sensuality to Hong Kong cinema.

So the 1950s–1990s were the time when Asian cinema first declared itself as an equal partner to the West, gave the world classic masterpieces and laid the foundation for subsequent generations.