There’s barely a week that goes by on the London cinema circuit where you won’t find some kind of festival to peruse. These festivals come in all shapes and sizes: they can present new work from a far-flung locale that otherwise wouldn’t have had the opportunity to travel; or a celebratory retrospective of an already-established star; or a huge extravaganza that focuses on previewing all the titles set for wider distribution later down the line.

In its own way, the London East Asia Film Festival (known by its handy acronym LEAFF) ticks all three of these boxes, and now in its sixth edition has firmly secured pride of place on the capital’s annual festival calendar. Founded by Festival Director Hyejung Jeon in 2015, the festival has grown to be the biggest East Asian film festival in the UK. The purpose of the festival is to celebrate a diverse range of new work plucked from Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, China, South Korea, the Philippines and Vietnam, from the latest genre cause celebre, to the micro indie that you might be hearing a lot about in the years to come. And this year, all films are screening in cinemas for that true, immersive experience.

Part of what makes the festival such a vital prospect is that it offers up the best new East Asian films that have been hand-picked by its selection team (who have no doubt trawled through hundreds of possible titles), but it allows its audience to receive a specifically curated panorama of what what East Asian audiences themselves are watching. So it’s not just a chance to sample some far-flung delights with a carefree detachment, but a way to sink yourself into the genuine, to-the-minute cinema culture of these various countries.

The films themselves are valuable works in their own right, but they also represent the ebb and flow of the wider culture and allow you to see what kind of films, say, are being made in South Korea following the explosive global success of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. As a way to enhance this sense of immersion further, LEAFF have created their own innovative, festival-specific “Taste of Asia” food menu in collaboration with Michelin-starred chef Joo Won and supported by Korea’s most popular noodle company, Nongshim.

But it doesn’t just end there. Beyond the central pillar of film screenings, the festival programme now offers ways to actually talk about and engage with East Asian cinema. The Telegraph critic Tim Robey is heading up a new critics’ workshop as a way to cultivate a new generation of young voices and help to enhance their skills as writers and commentators. It’s not about having more people being able to rhapsodise about a certain type of cinema, it’s to foment and expand knowledgeable and erudite conversation (which, let’s be fair, is what any filmmaker worth their salt really wants from a viewer).

This year’s edition opens on something of a bittersweet note with Raging Fire, the new film from Hong Kong genre stalwart Benny Chan, who sadly passed in 2020 at the age of 58. Chan is probably best known in the west for 2004’s New Police Story, in which he skillfully updated the Jackie Chan screwball classic from 1985, and LEAFF are offering further celebration of the director’s action-heavy oeuvre by screening his little-seen 1990 directorial debut, A Moment of Romance, in their Retrospective strand, which stars the great Andy Lau and is produced by the legendary Johnnie To.

Many films made over the last two years inevitably fall under the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it seems inevitable that there would be stories told about the subject. Chung Mong-Hong’s Taiwanese melodrama The Falls sees a woman suffering a chronic breakdown and losing her job, house and nearly the daughter who has been tending to her. The rituals of mask-wearing and self-quarantine help to make this central drama even more fraught. Min Kyu-dong’s South Korean The Prayer, meanwhile, takes the sci-fi-tinged of android nurses to muse on the ethical dilemmas of care and convalescence.

The Official Competition at this year’s edition that was carefully curated by the Festival Director Hyejung Jeon and programmers around Asia brings together stories about individuals searching for an elusive truth across a range of landscapes and social settings. Hong Kong’s Erica Li, for instance, explores the notion of true happiness in her film Just 1 Day about a terminally ill painter who attempts to engineer a single perfect day before he passes on.

Elsewhere Yujiro Harumoto’s epic A Balance from Japan looks at the journalistic aspect of filmmaking and the subject of a teacher-pupil suicide having a dark resonance within the director’s own family. Back to the Wharf from China’s Li Xiaofeng takes a lighter, more romantic look at a tense family gathering, while Tran Thanh Huy’s Ròm offers a brutal depiction of a poverty-stricken teenager fighting for survival on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City in the hope of relocating his parents.

The documentary strand this year offers, among other treats, two portraits of great women artists. The first is Areum Parkkang’s playful auto-critique Areum Married in which the Korean conceptual artist turns the camera on her increasingly busy domestic life and her work, which focuses on questions of gender representation. Keep Rolling, meanwhile, offers a profile of the great Chinese filmmaker Ann Hui, who has been making films for over 40 years and is known internationally for her 1982 classic, Boat People.

When it comes to household names in the west, aside from South Korea’s ultra-prolific Hong Sang-soo, who’s latest film Introduction plays in the official competition, there’s a chance to catch two titans of the Taiwanese New Wave working together in the restored 1985 masterpiece Taipei Story. It’s a tender drama written and directed by the late, very great Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and stars his compatriot and cohort, Hou Hsiao-hsien, who proves he’s as great a leading man as he is a director.

And if that wasn’t enough, Youn Yuh-jung’s ground-breaking Oscar and BAFTA win this year is celebrated through her debut role in Kim Ki-young’s psychodrama Woman of Fire, screened for the first time on the big screen in the UK. Closing things out with a bang is a chance to catch Yoon Jae-keun’s Spiritwalker, a film which merges together two beloved sub-genres: the martial arts movie and the body swap movie.

LEAFF (sponsored by Nongshim, HiteJinro, Korea Cultural Heritage Foundation, and the City of Jeonju) runs throughout October. Check out their full programme at leaff.org.uk

Hidden inside the London East Asian Film Festival’s programme was a rare treat: three animated features celebrating the centenary of the birth of Japanese animation, an art form that has since grown to become one of the country’s most important, valued cultural exports. Anime has always had a certain eccentricity about it (think of some of the stranger sequences in touchstone titles like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, or anything at the edges of the output of supposedly child-orientated Studio Ghibli), but the films which LEAFF selected to honour the medium’s milestone take this eclectic, imaginative approach to storytelling to new levels, loosening the limits of the logic of reality, and travelling through the very fabric of space and time.

Their first selection was the most well known, Millennium Actress, a 2001 film from recently departed, much missed director Satoshi Kon (Paprika, Perfect Blue), one of the form’s true visionaries and inspiration for a great many filmmakers in the animation world and wider. A film about film, Millennium Actress begins simply – two documentarians interview a reclusive former actress about her career, probing open up a chasm of memories that she had buried – before unfolding into something more complex, a meta-cinematic, hyper-referential puzzle about the entanglement of life and art, a fever dream of cycling subjectivities and blurred boundaries.

Kon makes incredible use of the freedom and mutability of his animated canvas. The film’s colour palette mutates from monochrome to increasingly saturated colour as time advances, scenes morph one into another in a mix of colours, shapes and matter, and everything passes with a remarkable, often breathtaking fluidity, crossing between styles and eras seamlessly, and constructing a pandora’s box style, multi-strand narrative that all fits together with surprising clarity. A profoundly ambitious film that entirely meets the demands it sets of itself, like the best films in the format, Millennium Actress is a masterwork that could only exist as animation.

Similar in conceit but far more surreal in execution, Masaaki Yuasa’s 2004 film Mind Game also begins with a straightforward scenario before spiralling wildly outwards from it. In the film’s opening scene, a man brashly enters a bar brawl only to find that his opponent is packing heat. The foe opens fire, and things get weird. The debut feature from one of Japanese animation’s most iconoclastic and exciting voices, Mind Game is precisely what its title suggests, an expressionistic, freeform and frequently bizarre headtrip of a film.

Facing death, the film’s protagonist is given a second chance, killing his aggressor and initiating a chase sequence that ends with him and his companions entering the belly of a whale, home to a mysterious man who has lived there for an eternity. Little that occurs after makes any objective sense, and an overall meaning – other than the oblique directive presented by the film’s tagline, ‘your life is the result of your own decisions’ – is hard to deduce. Unlike the journey presented by Kon’s film, where engaged viewership and active interpretation proves rewarding, this trip is best enjoyed abstractly, letting Yuasa’s psychedelic visuals, bright, painterly colours, and bouncy, energetic soundtrack wash over.

The last film was another time-warp, though this time not so much surreal as entirely unhinged. Co-directed by Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Metropolis) and Eiichi Yamamoto, maker of the recently rediscovered and reappraised erotic animation Belladonna of Sadness, Cleopatra was never released in the UK. A genuine oddity – part surrealist retelling of the story of its title character, part brash pornographic comedy – the film, though not entirely without merit, is unlikely to be reclaimed as a lost masterpiece of the medium.

In the weirdest act of teleportation in all of the three animations at LEAFF, Cleopatra begins with a crew of future space travellers being sent back through time and space to ancient Egypt to inhabit the bodies of various characters peripheral to the “Queen of Sex”, to witness her attempt to seduce and assassinate Julius Caesar. Cleopatra features a strange mix of the oddly artful, such as the abstract, minimalist linework in the impressionistic sex scenes; and the entirely puerile, with plenty of randomised cartoonish nudity and course, broad humour. Fans of animated esoterica will find something in it, but most viewers will leave confused.

It seems slightly short sighted that a celebration of 100 years of Japanese animation contains two films released in the 21st century and nothing made before 1970. However, these three films traverse more ground than might be first thought. Between them they travel far further than even the cinematic century could, exploring a history stretching way back before the medium’s origin, diving into subconscious territories, and flinging forward into future and imagined worlds. Why try to surmise history when you can invent it?

The 2017 London East Asian Film Festival ran 19-29 October. Cleopatra screens again on 2 December as part of the London International Animation Festival. Other works celebrating the centenary of Japanese animation can be viewed online on the website of Japan’s National Film Centre.