Asian Film Connections www.asianfilms.org/netpac/
Likely the best of its genre on the Web, this innovative, non-commercial resource spotlights "contemporary, culturally significant feature films from China, India, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan." On-line video clips, graphics, educational resources, filmographies, and solid critical analyses are all aimed at nurturing the development of Asian cinema.

For Asian filmmakers, this Website offers a new way to reach worldwide film audiences, vastly increasing the accessibility of their work. For those in the film business, it offers worldwide programmers, festival directors, distributors and exhibitors a way to contact filmmakers and producers about their films. For consumers, it offers a broader selection of cinematic choices, provides expanded global viewpoints, and promotes greater cultural understanding through film.

Akira Kurosawa Database 
www2.tky.3web.ne.jp/~adk/kurosawa/AKpage.html
Comprehensive, bilingual homage to Japan's world famous director, comprising a filmography, essays, poster gallery, bio-chronology and links. Visitors can take part in ranking Kurosawa's 30 films and contribute commentaries. Engaging memorial page and active bulletin board (even visited by a Philippine Elvis impersonator seeking gigs in Japan). Highlights include a great Kurosawa fishing anecdote and quoted glimpses of life on the set:

The production of Rashomon was physically challenging. Most of the shooting of the film took place in forest areas overrun with leeches. To protect themselves against this, the crew was forced to cover their bodies with salt before starting work each day. Many trees had to be cut down to let sufficient light filter in for the cameras. Black ink had to be added to the driving rain at Rashomon Gate to make the rain visible against the cloudy sky.

8arts.com - Asia's First Digital 
Film Festival
www.8arts.com/homepage.html
Going beyond mere clips, entire short films and animation from South-East Asia can be downloaded and viewed on RealPlayer. In "Faces" by Ho Wei Siong, a 3' 30" computer animated film, "an action figure with changeable facial parts, feels he isn't as popular as the rest of the action figures. He decides to revamp himself to a more macho image."

A City of Sadness http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/CityOfSadness/
Extrordinary analysis of Hou Hsiao-hsien's masterpiece "City of Sadness". Abe Mark Nornes & Yeh Yueh-yu collaborate to present contextual and stylistic information (including analysis of similarities to the work of the Japanese filmaker Ozu Yasujiro), photographs and soundclips. They also comment on the political nature of commentary on the cinema of Taiwan:

Chinese-language films from Taiwan and Hong Kong went relatively ignored under a specious definition of "Chinese" identical with the Peoples Republic of China. Therefore, the politics of choosing City of Sadness, a Taiwanese film made by the country's most celebrated filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien, can be seen as an intervention against the monolithic perspective dominating the definition of "Chinese" cinema in film studies.

Unlike the popular cinema, the New Indian cinema is almost always concerned with the common man. The heroes are not supermen with extraordinary ambition, who have to rise from poverty, tame the rich girl and fight the evil landlord, but ordinary men and women acting under the pressures of ordinary living. It is a form of individualization as the characters no longer have to represent icons of society like the "suffering wife" or the "evil mother-in-law". This also explains why the form of these films is usually neo-realistic, though there is a great variety in the films of different directors.

Foucault's Panopticon in Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, and Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero. http://pages.nyu.edu/~scs7891/rrtl.html

In-depth look at the parallels between these masterpieces of cinema. Sigmund Shen, a University of New York student, analyses the role of patriarchy in the two movies, themes of class struggle, and the modes of discipline that are used to organize the hierarchical society:

Thus the world of Chen's estate, along with the world of Firdaus's Cairo, are self-managing Panopticons which regulate their own efficiency through manipulation of, and the fostering of competition among, their oppressed objects. In each world existential learning is shown to be truer than academic learning, because the university, like the workplace, exists mainly to perpetuate the ruler's power.

The Korean Film Page http://koreanfilm.org/
Stylish, informative page delves into the substance as well as statistics of Korean cinema. Includes annual reports of film reviews and box office figures, monthly newsletters and some excellent essays covering history, the Korean war on celluloid, and instructions for visiting a cinema in Korea:

Dried squid, while not quite what popcorn is to American viewers, is nonetheless the traditional food to eat at the movies. Although quite chewy, it tastes okay and isn't as noisy as popcorn. (A reader wrote to me objecting to this last statement, claiming that the olfactory assault of dried squid more than compensates for the lack of noise)

The Illuminated Lantern www.illuminatedlantern.com/home.html
Quarterly e-zine devoted to "revealing the heart of Asian Cinema" features a different theme with each issue: ghosts and the supernatural, Peking Opera, gamblers, Taoist priests. Emphasis on Chinese films.

Kinema Club http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/Welcome.html
Study of Japanese moving image media, produced through the collaboration of many scholars around the world. Designed as a storehouse of information to keep everyone connected, also hosting the newsgroup KineJapan. Don't miss its collection of criticism and the searchable database of books and articles on Japanese media. Also offers teaching materials.

Chinese Cinema Page, by Shelly Kraicer www.interlog.com/~kraicer/
Archival trove of well-written reviews of movies from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Also offers articles on Asian cinema and links to other Chinese Movie Websites.

See also:
Chinese Movie Database www.dianying.com/ (Contains search engine, credits and interactive movie rating system)

Bollywood Central www.tcreng.com/bollywood/
An exhaustive search of Bollywood - India's huge cinema industry - turned up thousands of sites - mostly catering to this gossip intensive, highly competitive world. Among other the better sites were:
BollywoodOnline www.bollywoodonline.com/
Sriny's Bollywood Boulevarde www.sriny.com/

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
http://pears.lib.ohio-state.edu/Markus/criticism.html

UN Courier www.unesco.org/courier
See the October 2000 issue of the UN Courier for a wide-ranging and well-researched special feature on "The rage for Asian cinema".

Cinema is alive and well, and filmmakers are still surprising and enthusing us. More often than not, the most promising come from Asia, the continent at the head of a new cinematic movement.

    Although American hegemony has had devastating effects in some Asian countries (in Indonesia, for example, American companies control 99 per cent of distribution and have stifled local film-making), the continent’s overall scene is one of buzzing creativity.

Local Asia Online:
 Bangladesh  |  Burma  |  Cambodia  |  China  |  India  |  Indonesia  |  Japan  |  Korea
Laos  |  Malaysia  |  Mongolia  | Nepal  |  Pakistan   |  Singapore  |  Sri Lanka  |  Taiwan
Thailand  |  The Philippines  |  Tibet  |  Timor  |  Vietnam