The UK’s leading film festival championing the diverse creative industries of East Asia returns to cinemas in and around Leicester Square for its 8th edition this October. And as usual, the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) 2023 programme is jam-packed – with nearly 50 dynamic and thought-provoking works from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere.

This year’s schedule ranges from mainstream hits and restored classics to award-winning arthouse films – plus, the UK’s first retrospective on “the Korean Ken Loach”, Chung Ji-young. The director, whose drama Life and Death of the Hollywood Kid was submitted for Oscars submission in 1994, will be in attendance for events including the October 18 opening gala screening of new detective drama The Boys – based on the real-life robbery-murder known as the ‘Samrye Nara Super incident’, and starring powerhouse actor Sol Kyung-gu (Peppermint Candy).

Elsewhere, programme highlights include a spate of Cannes, Venice and Berlin alumni, plus features now submitted for 2024 Academy Awards consideration. Read more about them below in AnOther’s highlights of LEAFF 2023.

Mad Fate (Soi Cheang, 2023)

Friday, October 20 at 9pm – ODEON Luxe West End

In 2021, a few months after its premiere at Berlin Film Festival, Soi Cheang’s monochrome cyberpunk thriller Limbo provided LEAFF with one of its dramatic highlights – fulfilling the Hong Kong director’s ambition to revive the former glory of the city’s once-prestigious action cinema.

In 2023, the director reunites with the latter film’s star Gordon Lam (Infernal Affairs) for Mad Fate – the gritty tale of a deranged fortune teller who attempts to change the fate of a man destined to commit murder; another film that arrives at LEAFF after receiving its premiere at Berlin. Described by the South China Morning Post as “a frenzied experience that offers a morally complex meditation on good and evil”, it has also earned comparisons to the works of Hong Kong crime cinema icon Johnnie To elsewhere.

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023)

Saturday, October 21 at 9.15am – ODEON Luxe West End

At Europe’s leading film festivals, 2023 was a big year for East Asian actors. At Venice, much-adored Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love) became the first Chinese actor to receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement; his new espionage thriller Hidden Blade plays at LEAFF at Odeon Luxe West End on October 19th. At Cannes, meanwhile, the always-captivating Koji Yakusho (Cure) became the first Japanese performer to take home the ‘Best Actor’ prize in nearly two decades – for his role in Wim Wenders’ (Paris, Texas) toilet-scrubbing drama Perfect Days.

The latter, which has now been submitted for Academy Awards consideration, is a heartwarming affair concerning the near-mute Hirayama (Yakusho): a cultured and kindly older man who reads Faulkner, nurtures tiny pot plants and listens to classic Dad-rock cassettes – The Animals; Lou Reed; Patti Smith. Despite his obvious intelligence and workmanship, his role in society is of a lowly public toilet cleaner – begging the question of whether a ghost from Hirayama’s past may have curbed the trajectory of bigger and brighter social standing.

Yakusho’s wonderfully emotive physical performance, particularly towards the end of the film, highlights exactly why he is considered one of the greatest actors of his generation in Japan. But the movie also shines through Franz Lustig’s crisp cinematography, which captures the diverse fruits of the real-life ’Tokyo Toilet’ project – which renovated 17 public loos with the help of globally recognised architects with the aim of combatting stigmas and stereotypes.

In Our Day (Hong Sang-soo, 2023)

Saturday, October 21 at 12pm – ODEON Luxe West End

Korean arthouse icon Hong Sang-soo – winner of the Berlin Best Director prize in 2020 (The Woman Who Ran) and the Berlin Grand Jury Prize in 2022 (The Novelist’s Film) – remains prolific in 2023, with two new films screening in London over the next month. Before the single-location, chronology-shifting Walk Up screens at Cine Lumiere on November 15th for London Korean Film Festival, LEAFF presents another Hong film that debuted in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes earlier this year. 

In Our Day is the story of an actress in her 40s who meets an ageing poet living alone after the death of his cat. And if you’re familiar with the auteur’s unique brand of cinema, you’ll know exactly what to expect: as one Letterboxd user aptly puts it, “at least half of the runtime is just talking about a cat”. But that’s the magic of Hong’s beguiling and bare-laden style of filmmaking – with In Our Day praised as “yet another reinvention of Hong’s eternal mandala-wheel of talky two-shots, unadorned aesthetics and glancing, enigmatic, echoing themes” by Variety.

Kissing the Ground You Walked On (Hong Heng-fai, 2022)

Sunday, October 22 at 11am – ODEON Luxe West End

Better known as the “Las Vegas of Asia” gambling mecca, Macau is not well-known for its film industry acumen – “we currently [only] have six or seven theatres”, actor-turned-director Hong Heng-fai told The China Project earlier in 2023. But Hong’s new film Kissing the Ground You Walked On is one of a rare crop of Macanese films worthy of international repute.

The feature, named after a line from an Anton Chekhov play, premiered at Rotterdam Film Festival last year before competing for six prizes at Taiwan’s prestigious Golden Horse Awards in 2022; with head honcho Wen Tien-hsiang likening the director’s style to both Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car) and Tsai Ming-liang (Goodbye, Dragon Inn). And watching the queer-themed film, about a struggling middle-aged writer and his new tenant, a young actor, you can see that it’s an astute call.

Deliberately paced, delicately shot, and built on extended dialogues and meandering plotlines, Kissing the Ground You Walked On offers a gentle meditation on the struggles of creative lifestyles – with poetry excerpts and a beautiful neoclassical piano score by Ellison Lau adding to the sense of poignancy.

Where Has All the Pollution Gone? (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1992)

Thursday, October 26 at 5.30pm – The Cinema at Selfridges

One curiosity at this year’s festival is an early work by 2018 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters) – who, long before internationally-renowned works like 2022’s Broker and even 1995 narrative feature debut Maborosi, started his career in TV documentaries.

Topics such as elementary school children raising a cow (Lessons From a Calf, 1991) would provide fertile proving ground for Kore-eda as a documentary filmmaker, with Where Has All the Pollution Gone? another emblematic production of this period. It concerns the abnormally high rates of severe asthma reported since the 60s near the Kawasaki Steel Corp. steelworks in Chiba, and the legislative measures attempting to limit air pollution levels – which were reportedly on a scale ten times the size of Disneyland. 

Elsewhere in the programme, Kore-eda’s brilliant new narrative feature, Monster – the final film scored by beloved composer Ryuichi Sakamoto; and the winner of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes in 2023 – plays at Odeon Luxe West End on October 28th. It’s a modern masterpiece.

Dust of Angels (Hsu Hsiao-ming, 1992)

Friday, October 27 at 6.30pm – The Cinema at Selfridges

Two under-seen classics of the superfluous Taiwanese New Wave screen as part of the ‘Classics Restored’ strand – with both Ah Fei (Wan Jen) and Dust of Angels benefitting from the involvement of master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, one of the movement’s key progenitors.

For the former – a statement on female empowerment as witnessed through the changing fortunes of a Taiwanese family – Hou was a co-screenwriter (winning a Golden Horse award for his work). For the latter – a stunning meditation on the futility of the criminal lifestyle, focusing on a group of young thugs during a time of rapid societal change in Taiwan – he served as producer, with A Brighter Summer Day cinematographer Chang Hui-kung responsible for the meticulous shot composition throughout.

Like so many Taiwanese New Wave works, it is this visual element that really stands out in Dust of Angels. Fixed cameras capture the neon hum of karaoke clubs and busy urban streets as if they were lights on a Christmas tree, while impressively staged and lingering long takes chew on solemn street-side diners and blue boats moored at a mossy cliffside harbour. The atmosphere is occasionally punctuated by the sound of bullets and the sight of spilled blood, ensuring enough drama for Cannes Film Festival to include it as part of the Directors’ Fortnight strand in 1992.

Egoist (Daishi Matsunaga, 2022)

Saturday, October 28 at 2.30pm – ODEON Luxe West End

Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki, Our Little Sister), a wealthy fashion magazine editor who uses his clothes as “armour” to hide his homosexuality, meets a handsome personal trainer named Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa), who is secretly working as an escort in order to support his sick mother. Their romance begins with a kiss on the lips at the train station – and rapidly escalates into something far more passionate before an unexpected incident turns everything on its head.

Egoist is indeed, as Tokyo Weekender magazine puts it, “a very gay movie” – one that is remarkably unflinching in its capturing of male-on-male penetrative sex via intimate, close-up camerawork. But it’s also something far more poignant and heartfelt than it might first seem – with Ryohei Suzuki’s magnetic leading performance one of the film’s most venerable assets.

Concrete Utopia (Um Tae-hwa, 2023)

Sunday, October 29 at 7pm – ODEON Luxe Leicester Square

Another LEAFF highlight gunning for Oscars glory is Concrete Utopia – the official Korean submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. Already a critical and commercial hit – it’s the third highest-grossing movie of the year in South Korea, with praise garnered for the chameleonic performance of lead actor Lee Byung-hun (I Saw the Devil; Joint Security Area) – it now serves as one of the biggest draws at LEAFF, with director Um Tae-hwa and actress Park Bo-young present for a live Q&A after the closing gala screening.

The disaster thriller concerns a catastrophic earthquake in Seoul that levels the entire city to rubble. Only one building still stands: the Hwang Gung Apartments tower block, where survivors including the resident group leader, a public servant, his nurse wife, and a high school student must plan to avoid certain jeopardy. What ensues is something more socially conscious and thought-provoking than its genre trappings suggest – with many critics likening the film to Triangle of Sadness and JG Ballard’s High Rise.

The 8th London East Asia Film Festival runs from 18-29 October 2023.