Best Asian Directors (32 people)

1. Kurosawa Akira

Japanese

294 points by 3 voters

Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. Regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, he directed 30 films in a career spanning ...more

2. Miyazaki Hayao

Japanese

198 points by 2 voters

Miyazaki Hayao is a Japanese manga artist and prominent film director and animator of many popular anime feature films and one of Japan's greatest animation directors. The entertaining plots, compelling characters, and ...more

3. Koreeda Hirokazu

Japanese

198 points by 2 voters

Hirokazu Koreeda is a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. He is best-known for works such as Nobody Knows (2004) and Still Walking (2008). Before embarking on a career as a ...more

4. Wong Kar Wai

Hong Konger

195 points by 2 voters

Wong Kar Wai is a Hong Kong Second Wave filmmaker, internationally renowned as an auteur for his visually unique, highly stylized work, including As Tears Go By (1988), Days of Being Wild ...more

5. Ozu Yasujiro

Japanese

193 points by 2 voters

Yasujiro Ozu was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He began his career during the era of silent films. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious ...more

6. Park Chan Wook

South Korean

191 points by 2 voters

Park Chan Wook is a South Korean film director, screenwriter, producer, and former film critic. One of the most acclaimed and popular filmmakers in his native country. His films are noted for ...more

7. Kim Ki Duk

South Korean

191 points by 2 voters

Kim Ki Duk was a South Korean filmmaker noted for his idiosyncratic art-house cinematic works. His films have received many distinctions in the festival circuit, making him one of the most important ...more

8. Tsukahara Ayuko

Japanese

100 points by 1 voters

Tsukahara Ayuko is a Japanese director and producer. She graduated from Chiba University's Literature Department.

9. Bong Joon Ho

South Korean

96 points by 1 voters

Bong Joon Ho is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. Bong in general is known as being a director who takes a great interest in film genres, while simultaneously trying to ...more

10. Zhang Yi Mou

Chinese

95 points by 1 voters

Zhang Yimou is a Chinese film director, producer, writer and actor, and former cinematographer. He is counted amongst the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, having made his directorial debut in 1987 with ...more

11. Edward Yang

Taiwanese

94 points by 1 voters

Edward Yang is considered one of the leading filmmakers of Taiwan's New Wave Cinema movement in the 1980s and 1990s. Yang went to university and lived in the United States before deciding ...more

12. Bob Xin

Chinese

93 points by 1 voters

Bob Xin is a Chinese director and guitarist. In 2020, he directed the drama "The Bad Kids"; on October 28, he won the "Top Five Young Directors of 2020" award.

13. Shindo Kaneto

Japanese

92 points by 1 voters

Shindo Kaneto was a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film producer, and author. He directed 48 films and wrote scripts for 238. His best known films as a director include Children of Hiroshima, ...more

14. Kurosawa Kiyoshi

Japanese

91 points by 1 voters

Kiyoshi Kurosawa is a Japanese film director, screenwriter, film critic and a professor at Tokyo University of the Arts. Although he has worked in a variety of genres, Kurosawa is best known ...more

15. Kobayashi Masaki

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Masaki Kobayashi was a Japanese film director, best known for the epic trilogy The Human Condition (1959–1961), the samurai film Seppuku (1962), and Ghost Stories (1964). Kobayashi studied ancient oriental arts and ...more

16. Honda Ishiro

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Honda Ishiro was a Japanese film director, producer, screenwriter and editor. He is best known for his kaiju and tokusatsu films, including several entries in the Godzilla series, but also worked extensively ...more

17. Beat Takeshi

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Takeshi Kitano is a Japanese comedian, television personality, director, actor, author, and screenwriter. While he is known primarily as a comedian and TV host in his native Japan, abroad he is known ...more

18. Itami Juzo

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Juzo Itami, born Yoshihiro Ikeuchi, was a Japanese actor, screenwriter and film director. He directed eleven films, all of which he wrote himself. The son of Mansaku Itami, prewar director of satiric ...more

19. Tsukamoto Shinya

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

In 1986 a new film blasted to the centre of Japanese cinema, gaining international acclaim with its singularly inventive style and cataclysmic violence. Shinya Tsukamoto directed this 16-mm sci fi horror called ...more

20. Suzuki Seijun

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Seijun Suzuki was a Japanese filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter. His films are known for their jarring visual style, irreverent humour, nihilistic cool and entertainment-over-logic sensibility. He made 40 predominately B-movies for the ...more

21. Fukasaku Kinji

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Kinji Fukasaku was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. He is known for directing the Japanese portion of the Hollywood film Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), yakuza films including the seminal Battles Without ...more

22. Kinoshita Keisuke

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Kinoshita Keisuke was a Japanese film director. Kinoshita was highly prolific, turning out some 42 films in the first 23 years of his career. For this, Kinoshita explained that he "can’t help ...more

23. Ichikawa Kon

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Ichikawa Kon was a Japanese director born in Ujiyamada, Mie. He has worked on a wide range of films, from entertainment films to documentaries to TV historical dramas, and was involved in ...more

24. Teshigahara Hiroshi

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Teshigahara Hiroshi was a Japanese avant-garde filmmaker. He is best known for his films "Woman in the Dunes" and "The Face of Another". Teshigahara is the first person of Asian descent to ...more

25. Okamoto Kihachi

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Okamoto belonged to what one colleague called "the generation where most of them got killed": the leagues of university graduates who were drafted into and sacrificed to the last years of Japan's ...more

26. Tsai Ming Liang

Malaysian

0 points by 0 voters

Tsai is a notable filmmaker in Taiwan's Second New Wave movement. He was born in Malaysia and lived there for twenty years, before moving to Taipei, Taiwan. His first film was "Rebels ...more

27. Hong Sang Soo

South Korean

0 points by 0 voters

Hong Sang Soo began his film career at Chung-Ang University in South Korea, before moving to the United States where he received his bachelor's degree from the California College of Arts and ...more

28. Kim Yong Hwa

South Korean

0 points by 0 voters

Kim Yong Hwa is a South Korean producer, director, and scriptwriter.

29. Choo Chang Min

South Korean

0 points by 0 voters

Choo Chang Min is a South Korean director and screenwriter.

30. Oshima Nagisa

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Nagisa Oshima was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His films include In the Realm of the Senses (1976), a sexually explicit film set in 1930's Japan, and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence ...more

31. Mizoguchi Kenji

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. Mizoguchi's work is renowned for its long takes and mise-en-scène. According to writer Mark Le Fanu, "His films have an extraordinary force and ...more

32. Naruse Mikio

Japanese

0 points by 0 voters

Mikio Naruse was a Japanese filmmaker, screenwriter, and producer who directed some 89 films spanning the period 1930 (towards the end of the silent period in Japan) to 1967. Naruse is known ...more