Cinemas of Asia

Series editors: Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Andrew David Jackson and Jason Jones (Monash University)

Cinemas of Asia is the first series devoted to the cinemas of South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia and global Asian diasporas. Each short-format volume of 30,000-40,000 words provides a critical analysis and interpretation of a single movie. The series aims to capture the diversity of Asian cinema for fans, lovers, and students of Asian film. Each volume is accessible, informative, written in an engaging style, and open to non-experts, academics, students, and cinephiles. All the books tell a story about why a particular film is worthy of consideration and how it is viewed within its context country.

About the Series

Cinemas of Asia focuses on the films of South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia, as well as the movies of global Asian diasporas. Our goal is not to create or comment on a list of canonical films. Instead, the series selects and provides critical introductions to notable films from the history of Asian world cinemas. These include films already judged critically and artistically valuable, neglected films worthy of reassessment, off-beat and cult movies, and films from state media contexts like North Korea (the DPRK) or the People’s Republic of China. Above all else, we include films that were and are watched in Asia and deserve to be seen everywhere, not just those works consecrated by Euro-American academic and cinephile discourses. We aim to provide jargon-free, concise, critical, well-illustrated introductions to each movie in a pocket-size format that appeals to readers and authors and is available open access in digital format across the world.

Each book is between 30,000 and 40,000 words, consists of a set of thematic chapters, a style that makes the books approachable to non-academics, liberal use of screenshots and illustrations (c. 20-30 per volume), and credits featuring details about the film’s production. The series offers enough flexibility to allow authors to focus on a particular film according to their own style and expertise (e.g. film, literary, historical, gender, post-/decolonial studies). However, the format of each volume is uniform enough to provide a consistent reader experience.

Cinemas of Asia is targeted at film fans, festival goers, scholars, and secondary and tertiary level film course educators and their students. We seek contributions from Asian film studies experts, literary scholars, film historians, critics, journalists, and festival programmers who write about Asian cinema but feel their passions are not shared by the current publishers of volumes on single films.

Publish with Cinemas of Asia

If you have a project that might be a good fit for Cinemas of Asia, please reach out to the series editors, Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Andrew David Jackson, and Jason Jones (series email address TBA), and to Lever Press's acquiring editor, Sean Guynes (sean@leverpress.org), to describe your project.