Seoul-Hong Kong-Macau: Love with an Alien (1957) and Postwar Korea-Hong Kong Co-Production

This chapter presents a history of the 1950s cinematic co-production in Asia by exploring the historical, social, cultural, and intellectual constitution of the first South Korea and Hong Kong cinema network after the Korean War armistice. It examines the network of motion picture executives, creative personnel, policymakers, and intellectuals in South Korea and Hong Kong at the height of the Cold War. The chapter discusses Love with an Alien and locates the text in the complex web of a regional cinema network. The idea of creating a regional cinema network, however, revived in the mid-1950s under the US-driven world order that had drawn the new map of Asia. Cinematic co-production is, indeed, a notoriously dubious entity to most national cinema scholars. Instead of making local cinema in vernacular languages, Shaw Brothers began to produce numerous Mandarin films for the thriving overseas Chinese communities. © 2020 Taylor & Francis.