When Hollywood falls silent, Asia speaks: Cinema in the 21st century
On Jan. 11, beneath the dazzling chandeliers of the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, Lee Byung-hun’s name was not called out when the winner of the award for Best Male Actor in a Musical or Drama was announced. A few months earlier, just down the road in Culver City, a very different scene unfolded at the Asian World Film Festival (AWFF), where Lee confidently raised the trophy for Best Achievement in Cinema.
These two striking, divergent moments were more than a simple contrast. Somewhere within world cinema, a faint tremor could be felt. Where is cinema in the 21st century headed now?
Today’s Hollywood appears to be suffering from a kind of creative numbness, trapped inside familiar formulas prescribed by algorithms. Endless sequels and reboots repeat themselves. In this hollow world where human faces and the fractures of lived experience have been erased, what must we restore?
Interestingly, a clue emerged from the words of AWFF’s executive director, Georges N. Chamchoum. “Asia still has a soul,” he said. “Korean cinema has stories that make people laugh, cry and ultimately move them.”
Opening with Park Chan-wook’s "No Other Choice," AWFF questions the Western-centered grammar that has treated the narratives of a particular culture as the world’s standard.
When asked why he chose Los Angeles to host an Asian film festival, Chamchoum redefined “Asia” not as a fixed geographical or racial category, but a constantly evolving social construct. Asia, he noted, is not a boundary drawn by an external gaze, but a current shaped by the meeting of different experiences.
While the West continues to consume “Asia” like an exotic spice or mysterious spectacle, AWFF brings living voices from places like Palestine, Central Asia and beyond onto a single stage. The soul of this cinema ultimately resides in raw narratives that testify, in their own languages, to the wounds of colonialism, division, diaspora and rapid modernization. While Hollywood manufactures safe commodities, Asian filmmakers continue to stare into society’s deepest fissures, drawing out the anxieties of the age and transforming them into a shared symbol that remembers wounds and builds solidarity.
The Golden Globes and the Oscars represent the most powerful forms of symbolic capital within the field. The success of Parasite undoubtedly cracked the old order, yet the familiar tastes and unconscious preferences of mainstream juries remain firmly intact. There are values their gaze fails to capture, stories that cannot be converted into their preferred form of social capital.
It is here that AWFF questions who gets to tell stories, and what makes a film “great.” It is a modest but deliberate step toward new standards and new forms of symbolic capital.
Man-su, the character portrayed by Lee in "No Other Choice," embodies the universal anxiety of modern life — the fear of being replaceable as technology and competition advances relentlessly. The subtle tremors of his face and his hollow gaze silently testify to the helplessness of the individual before the system. It is a fear that crosses borders, a portrait of all of us under global capitalism.
Of course, cultural resistance can ultimately be absorbed by the logic of capital. However, the point is not the number of trophies, but the shift from being an object of recognition to becoming a subject that rewrites the standards.
Lee’s AWFF honor signals that it has captured the times, while the Golden Globes failed. In a world where technology replaces humans and competition erodes solidarity, this narrative of anxiety embodied in the face of an Asian actor has emerged as one of the most urgent voices today.
AWFF was not a platform for introducing Asian cinema to Hollywood. It was a quiet yet resolute declaration of independence; an effort to rewrite the standards of cinema and narrative in the very center of cultural capital. It was an act of remembering the anxieties and survival of those long scattered.
The question remains: Are we continuing to wait for recognition from an outdated center, or ready to step forward as subjects who rewrite the world’s standards?
Lee Kyung-hwa (khl@namjunepaikcfoundation.org), a graduate of Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is the international director of the Nam June Paik Cultural Foundation.