Before Peter Leung started volunteering with the Vancouver Asian Film Festival, he didn’t even know that such a film festival existed.

“That was during the seventh Vancouver Asian Film Festival, and I was like, ‘There’s a Vancouver Asian Film Festival? How come I’ve never heard of it?’ ” he told the Georgia Straight when reached by phone.

Now in its 15th year, the four-day festival, which highlights movies by Asian and South Asian filmmakers and actors, particularly those residing in North America, has risen in popularity and has a dedicated community.

“We’re the oldest running Asian Canadian film festival in the country. That’s a rather significant feat for us, mostly because it is run on entirely volunteer work and very little funding,” said Leung, who is now VAFF’s festival director.

This year, nearly 60 movies will be shown at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas, from Thursday to Sunday (November 3 to 6).

The festival opener is writer-director Bertha Bay-Sa Pan’s Almost Perfect, which stars Asian American actor Kelly Hu and Vancouver-born Canto-pop star Edison Chen.

“This is one of our more commercial offerings this year,” Leung said. “It’s about family and love, and one Asian daughter who more or less takes on all the problems of her dysfunctional family members and then wonders why she doesn’t have time for a life for herself.”

The other major film, Surrogate Valentine, will close the festival and stars San Francisco folk singer-songwriter Goh Nakamura. The feature, which follows Nakamura (who plays himself) as he looks for romance and connections through his music, has been popular at film festivals this year, recently closing the 2011 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

New to this year’s VAFF program is Love Letters to Vancouver, a series of short films by Canadian filmmakers, such as Quentin Lee, Joanna Wong, and Anand Kanna. The shorts, which touch on topics as diverse as the annual dragon boat festival, YVR, and the Canucks’ 2011 playoff run, precede almost all of the screenings.

“Because this year sort of coincided with the city’s 125th birthday and things like that, we decided to look into how local Asian Canadian directors feel about Vancouver,” Leung said. “So throughout all of the programs and screenings are little short video poems, love letters to Vancouver.”

Leung said that what all of the films—shorts, features, and documentaries—ultimately capture is a search for identity.

“For these particular filmmakers, there’s still a search for a place to belong, and there’s tinges of that throughout the work that they’ve done, as opposed to things from China, where they’re not really wondering why they’re living in China at all,” Leung said. “It’s people and place, whether it’s the diaspora of being transplanted from one place to another or how that affects us culturally.”

Since the majority of films shown were made in North America, almost all of them are in English. Accordingly, most of these movies speak to first-, second-, and third-generation Asian Canadians, who comprise the majority of festivalgoers. However, Leung makes assurances that VAFF is accessible to all audiences.

“It’s really one of the few places, one of the few opportunities in a year, to have those of us who are second generation to be in a large room together looking at images and stories that directly relate to us and where we are in the city,” Leung said. “There isn’t a lot of star power here, but the intensity and the force of the stories are extremely good.”