Introduction

Hi everyone, and welcome to Asian Screens, a blog created for an English course at INAsup.

The aim of this website is to share some “miscellaneous observations on Asian film industries” as the tagline states. Well, ok, but what does it mean exactly? To explain it, allow me a short self-introduction.

My name is Lila, and although I’ve had a rather messy curriculum so far, there’s one thing I’ve been doing steadily for the past 7 years, and that is working as a volunteer for a variety of nonprofit medias. Since I moved around a lot, every new location gave me a different opportunity: radio broadcast, printed press, blogs, websites and podcasts… Before I knew it, it became a way of life and I had to find a way to express myself wherever I was.

I first started doing press reviews and international news, then switched to video game journalism and eventually to movie reviews, since this is where my main interest lies. Then, in September 2016, shortly before I left France for a 9-month assignment to Viet Nam (which ended up lasting 6 months due to visa issues, but that’s a story for another blog) and a year of study in Japan, I joined the team of EastAsia.fr, which is a website specialised in Asian movies.

Living in Asia and writing every week about the local film industries (as I was not only submitting reviews, but also news, BO reports and interviews), I started accumulating a number of anecdotes that I am only too glad to share. However, even though I get to mention them now and then on EastAsia.fr, they don’t quite fit the editorial line, so I don’t get the chance to elaborate on them. As I wouldn’t want to merely translate my usual work into English for this blog (and am, frankly, too bored of it to do more of the same stuff), I figured out it would be a good opportunity to finally write a few lines about things that amused or astonished me in my years researching and analysing Asian cinema.

So, here is the how and the why of this project. Since it does not explore a specific topic, the information you’ll find here might appear a bit random, but I hope you’ll enjoy it and learn a few unuseful things!

Lila