This thesis examines the output of filmmakers who were active in Okinawa during the mid-1980s through the 2000s, filmmakers whom I identify as “Okinawan New Wave.” In response to cataclysmic changes accompanying Okinawa’s economic and ideological assimilation to mainland Japan subsequent to the 1972 reversion of sovereignty from the US to Japan, the ascending generation of Okinawan youth asserted in diverse channels of popular entertainment their own hybrid culture as the principal feature of their distinct identity. A group of university-educated cinephiles, led by Nakae Yūji, first undertook writing and publishing their film reviews and then began making 8-mm features in the mid-1980s. Following in the footsteps of their predecessor and art-cinema maverick Takamine Gō, these filmmakers not only departed ideologically from contemporaneous Japanese films which were presenting Okinawa as an exotic Other within the Japanese national boundaries, but also wholeheartedly embraced the aesthetics of popular cinema, with the intention to attract the local audiences. Through assigning the term “Okinawan New Wave” to this youth movement within the local film culture, I aim to offer reassessment of the local popular cinema that had been dismissed as merely reproducing the dominant stereotypes of Okinawa then present in Japanese cinema. In analysing New Wave films, this thesis traces the advent, development, and decline of the Okinawan New Wave and scrutinizes their commercial breakthrough with the omnibus film, Pineapple Tours (Makiya Tsutomu, Nakae Yūji, and Tōma Hayashi, 1992), and the consequences of Nakae’s nationwide success with Nabbie’s Love (1999), which unleashed both the widespread media attention to Okinawa and exploitation of cinematic tropes of films set in Okinawa (Okinawa eiga) by mainland Japanese cinema and television dramas. By exhuming the Okinawan New Wave’s affirmation of cultural hybridity and also destabilization of the previously received notions of nationhood, this thesis highlights the enduring significance of new wave cinema for local youth culture.