Framing Tokyo Media Capital and Asian Co-Production

Abstract

Regions are mediated. Often entwined with film and media production, they are constructed across a conflicting range of ideological, economic and cultural forces. There have been many reports on the rise in regional film and media co-productions over the past decade or more. Much has also been made of the convergence of this rise with the ascendancy of a “new Asia” of intensified economic and cultural production. In this analysis, film and media co-production often becomes a sign of new possibilities for the region—the possibilities of new markets, new identities, new networks and even new technologies. Yet co-productions do not only signal desires for the production of this ever-emergent Asia. If regionalism, like globalization, is a “complex, conflicting and indeterminate process,” then the regional co-production is also a window into its conflicts, complexities, and negotiations.¹