Shuqi.org - Asian Cinema

Introduction

There was a time when Asian movies were something you only saw on old scratched VHS tapes, and they were hard to come by. That changed with the arrival of the DVD format. Soon Asian films reached the far corners of the world, and everywhere people started to realize that the region had something truly unique to offer.

Asian Cinema is coming out in force, at a time when Hollywood is falling victim to its own formulaic approach to film-making, Asia is the place to look for a different film experience.

Filmmakers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and China take familiar stories and add their own twists and use their own cultural backgrounds to spice things up. It’s not always easily accessible, it doesn’t always work, but it’s almost always fascinating to watch.

A lot of Asian films come out on DVD in their native countries with English subtitles, giving us Western folks an excellent opportunity to watch them, without having to wait for some local distribution company to wake up, and import them. These DVDs are readily available from many online shops, and only require that you own a region free DVD player.

We are two guys from Denmark, who love Asian films and watch a lot of them on DVD. Hoping to get you to share that love, we will be reviewing as many of these films as possible. The focus will be on the films themselves, not the DVDs. We’ll handle as many of the new titles as possible, but we’ll also go back and look at old classics when we have the time. Some reviews will be short, some will be long, some will be negative, most will be positive.

In the end, all we really want is for you to see the films and make up your own mind about them.

David Bjerre & Uffe Stegmann
October 2004