Southeast Asian cinema has become increasingly well known to audiences beyond the region, owing to several recent high-profile successes. Apichatpong Weerasethakul has won major prizes at Cannes, including the Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010); Brillante Mendoza won the Best Director award at Cannes for Kinatay (Butchered, 2009); in 2013 Anthony Chen won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for Ilo Ilo (2013), the same year that Rithy Panh won the Un Certain Regard section at the same festival for The Missing Picture (2013). Many other Southeast Asian directors have achieved international critical success over the years too, including Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal, Lav Diaz, Wisit Sasanatieng, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, Eric Khoo, Amir Muhammad, Yasmin Ahmad, Garin Nugroho, Nia Dinata and Trần Anh Hùng. Taken together, these filmmakers offer an impressive view of the region's filmmaking. This is a critically acclaimed and artistically – as well as often politically – accomplished cinema, which has understandably attracted considerable academic interest.

Yet while such successes have demonstrated that the region's cinema can compete on the global stage, they only provide a partial view of its cinematic achievements. Southeast Asian cinemas have also been successful in attaining a significant share of the domestic film market – a notable accomplishment, considering the strength of global film industries, such as Hollywood, Hong Kong cinema and Indian cinemas, which have all attained a strong presence in the region. The success of domestic industries has been evident throughout Southeast Asia, especially in the countries with the larger film industries, such as the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, but even historically in some of the region's smaller cinematic nations, which have experienced golden ages during which large quantities of films were produced. The Burmese film industry grew in the post-independence era, reaching an apex of ninety-two films in 1962 alone (Ferguson 2020: 83); before the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 there was an output of over 400 films; in Singapore, the Malay film industry of the late-1940s to the 1970s produced over 360 films. Although the reasons for this success are complex and varied, these examples indicate that an important component of the region's cinema is its popular, mainstream filmmaking, aimed at a domestic audience.