Press Release 6/10/2023
The 8th edition of the renowned London East Asia Film Festival is back with this year’s rich and diverse programme comprising 48 titles, both contemporary and restored classics, including 12 International premieres and 25 UK premieres from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Tibet, Philippines, and Macao. The Festival will take place from October 18th to October 29th, 2023, and it follows these main strands: Retrospective of Director Chung Ji-Young, LEAFF’s Official Selection, Competition, Stories of Women, Halloween Horror Special, Cherish the World, LGBTQIA+, and Classics Restored, all curated by Festival Director Hyejung Jeon, with a team of festival advisors and programmers based in East Asia and the UK.
This year, Taiwanese cinema has been highly regarded by the Festival, which decided to screen 7 films with entries in three of the main strands: Stories of Women, with Little Blue (Director Lee Yi-fang) and Untold Herstory (Director Zero Chou), Competition, with Coo-Coo 043 (Director Chan Ching-Lin), Day Off + Q&A (Director Fu Tien-yu), and GAGA (Director Laha Mebow), and Classics Restored, in partnership with Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI), with Ah Fei (Director Wan Jen) and Dust of Angels (Director Hsiao-Ming Hsu).
Furthermore, this year, audiences will be able to immerse themselves in a special Taiwan night held at Odeon Luxe West End on October 21st. The night will begin with the screening of Day Off, released in 2023, which has already won the ‘Mulberry award for best screenplay’ at the Far East Film Festival in April. Afterward, the screening will be followed by an enriching live Q&A with Director Fu Tien-Yu at the cinema. Finally, audiences are invited to join the Taiwan-themed reception, where they will have the precious opportunity to learn more about Taiwan and its diverse culture. This annual special event highlights the growing interest of UK audiences in Taiwanese culture and the central position that the London East Asia Film Festival occupies in showcasing East Asian cultures and, in particular, its cinema.
LEAFF, founded in 2015, has had a long and fruitful collaboration with Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture since 2017 and, to this day, represents one of the unmissable yearly events in the UK capital, showcasing East Asian cultures and cinema together with enriching Q&A sessions by filmmakers, actors, critics, and academics, which provide the audiences with the opportunity of learning more about different countries’ socio-economic issues, intergenerational relationships, climate change, sense of identity and belonging, which usually do not get as much attention in the mainstream media. This year’s Festival is organized around the themes of justice and good fortune through the unique lens of different East Asian filmmakers.
Chen Pin-Chuan, the Director of the Cultural Division of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK, expressed that 2023 has been an extremely fruitful year in terms of collaborations with cultural organizations in the UK. The Taiwan Film Series at Manchester’s HOME, the Queer East Film Festival in London, and the year-long Taiwan film series at the National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI) in Finland, have all been well-received by local audiences and represent the increasing interest in Taiwanese cinema, often with outstanding inclusivity of themes and focuses such as the LGBTQAI+ cinema, film series showcasing exciting and often neglected niches, and the inclusion of Indigenous directors and films. Together with the other UK and Scandinavian institutions, the London East Asia Film Festival continues to be an essential platform for introducing more recent Taiwanese commercial films.
Programme and related events can be found on the following website: https://www.leaff.org.uk/2023-programme
Media contact: Assistant Director Lin Shin-Yi, Taipei Representative Office in the UK. Email: shinyi238@moc.gov.tw