Cinema of Asia

Template:Southeast Asian cinema Template:Middle Eastern Cinema Asian cinema refers to the film industries and films produced in the continent of Asia. More commonly however, it is used to refer to the cinema of Eastern, Southeastern and South Asia. These regions are linked by a measure of common history and interaction - for example South East Asia is heavily influenced by both South Asian (i.e. Indian) culture, and East Asian (i.e. Chinese) culture - and South Asia and East Asia share high degrees of cultural commonality themselves. The commonality of dharmic/Indic religion such as Buddhism and Hinduism across these regions, the geographical proximity, and the ancient ties that these areas share leads to the broad classification of these areas into common terms like Asian cinema, Far Eastern Cinema, Oriental Cinema or Eastern cinema.

The far east as a cultural block includes East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

The phrase Asian cinema is often linked to regional implications of the word Asian. For example, Asians in the USA are generally thought of as East Asians and South East Asians, due to the large presence of those ethnicities there, and Asians in the UK and commonwealth countries generally refers to South Asians, due to the large presence of those ethnicities there. Generally West Asians are thought of as Middle Eastern, and thus are not usually classified as Asian cinema, although sometimes Iran is included due to the fame of its cinema and proximity to South Asia. North Asia is dominated by siberian Russia, and is thus considered European cinema. Central Asia is usually grouped with the Middle East.

East Asian cinema is typified by the cinema of Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, including the Japanese anime industry and martial arts action films of Hong Kong. South Asian cinema is typified by the cinema of India, which contains many regional film industries, including Bollywood, whose output is the largest in the world in terms of the number of films produced and in the number of tickets sold. The world famous Asian Academy of Film & Television is also based in India . South East Asian cinema is typified by the cinema of Thailand and other South East Asian contries.