Introduction: Trans-Asian cinemas at home in the world

This large collaborative project was first conceived around the turn of 2019–2020 right before the COVID-19 pandemic brought shock waves and tragic loss. The pandemic has ushered tremendous changes in public health, the environment, economy, politics, and culture on varying local, national, regional, and global scales, as well as everyday life, including shopping and movie-going. The first outbreak in Wuhan, China, which had been thriving on a booming export-led, real estate bubble- and infrastructure-undergirded economy and an expanding domestic film market, suddenly put everything on brakes and in lockdown mode one city after another. And it swiftly spread across the world. The “transnational flow” of people and goods, including popular culture and movies, facilitated by trans-regional and trans-continental airlines and cargo ships, suddenly “froze” in time and space. In its wake, Zoom and other online platforms replaced myriad forms of in-person interpersonal exchanges, especially in education, socialization, and cultural and artistic production and consumption. Film festivals around the globe, which embody the global flow of movies, film personnel, and audience par excellence, with some initial hesitation, took on a phantom, virtual existence by going online. Booming film industries in countries like China and South Korea, as in Hollywood and Bollywood, took a nosedive to reach near collapse, as the relation of commercial films with theatrical “box office” revenues was transformed drastically (Fortmueller 2021; Li, Wilson, and Guan 2023). It is not until the spring of 2023, when the WHO officially declared the end of the pandemic and the world has learned to live with the virus, that things began to approach a semblance of normalcy.