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The demand for all areas of Nordic film and television culture outside the borders of the Nordic countries may come as no surprise. The popularity of television shows such as The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007) and The Bridge (Bron|Broen, 2011) both domestically and internationally have increased the profile of Nordic media while the crime novels of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson have penetrated the American market – the barometer for global Commercial ‘relevance’. The Guardian in the UK has published several articles on the craze, noting how the protagonist of the original Danish version of The Killing, detective Sarah Lund, has become an unlikely fashion icon with her knitted sweaters. While a certain type of Nordic film – the existential artistry of a Dreyer, a Bergman or a Kaurismäki – has existed at the periphery of this global consciousness, such perceptions are clearly shifting as the contemporary situation seems to be more characterised by Nordic contributions to global popular culture instead of the more traditional frameworks of artistic or experimental relevance. How did we get to this situation? In short, how did the media products of this small region of the world become part of global popular culture?

The Infernal Affairs trilogy provides the illusion of an epic sweep (from 1991–2003) that covers the issues of government legitimacy, global capitalist expansion, individual alienation, and the implosion of a system that blurs “legitimate” political authority with an underground “illegitimate” economic reality. As part of the New Hong Kong Cinema Series, this short book attempts to highlight the significance of Infernal Affairs within the context of contemporary Hong Kong cinema as well as within global film culture by examining all three films in the trilogy. This analysis of Infernal Affairs concludes with a look at the trilogy's self-reflexive allusions to the mass media and the current state of Hong Kong film culture within a global context. In particular, the Infernal Affairs and the New Wave are discussed.

This chapter analyzes Faouzi Bensaidi’s high-tech love story WWW: What a Wonderful World as a meditation on the realized, partial, and failed connections of cultural and economic globalization. A cinematic tribute film that points to endless chains of meaning, to other movies rather than to social realities, WWW does not deliver a moral lesson, whether about film or the objects of its images. Rather, absurdist mash-ups of characters, scenes, and plot lines from sometimes incongruous film genres and social fantasies challenge our cinematic-visual literacy and our knowledge of cinematic value. This chapter shows how the film entertainingly places film and socioeconomic tropes on a collision course while detailing a love affair with cinema that persists even as the medium retreats from regional popularity.