Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood

Cinema has been global from the start: the Lumière brothers held their first public paid screening in Paris in December 1895, and within a few years films circulated worldwide. Hollywood came to dominate global box offices in the 20th century, backed by large studios and distribution networks. Yet other film cultures grew powerfully.

India's first full-length feature, Raja Harishchandra, appeared in 1913, and the Hindi film industry in Mumbai, nicknamed Bollywood, became famous for musical storytelling popular across South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In Nigeria, the 1992 video film Living in Bondage helped launch Nollywood, which became one of the world's most prolific film industries by producing low-budget films for home viewing. In 2020, the South Korean film Parasite became the first non-English-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

This shows that global media flows are increasingly multidirectional.