'What we've done over the years is try to look at things that are in front of us,' says festival programmer Philip Cheah. 'These can be the hardest things to see. What distinguishes us is our festival's grit and guts. It's not so much glam and glitz. We look after the smaller voices of Asian cinema, and I think it's an important thing to do. Today, on the festival circuit, everyone looks out for the top directors, but who's going to look after the lesser-known ones?'

It's been a long journey for the Siff, which has always had a low budget - Cheah declines to specify this year's, but it's believed to be less than S$1 million (HK$5.1 million). 'It's the audience that has kept us going all these years,' he says.

Whereas the first Siff in 1987 showed only 50 films, this year's is offering more than 320 titles from 40 countries, including 110 feature films, over 13 days.

Festival-goers yesterday saw some of Singapore's landmark short films such as Eric Khoo's 1994 Pain; Kelvin Tong, Jasmine Ng and Sandi Tan's 1996 joint effort Moveable Feast; and Royston Tan's 2002 short film 15, from which the feature-length film by the same title emerged. 'The retrospective clearly showed the trajectory of Singaporean independent film-making,' says Cheah.

Some of these filmmakers now enjoy international recognition and are festival regulars, he says. Khoo's Be with Me, for example, opened the Director's Fortnight at Cannes two years ago; Tan has won awards at Clermont-Ferrand and Deauville; and Tong's horror film The Maid was a big hit in Malaysia and Singapore when it opened in 2005.

The festival's Silver Screen Awards were started in 1991 as the first Asian-only film competition in the region. Over the years, many filmmakers have benefited from recognition at these awards, including Indonesia's Garin Nugroho and Riri Riza, and Filipino director Lav Diaz, who felt encouraged to make his nine-hour The Evolution of a Filipino Family after winning the award in 2002 with his five-hour Batang West Side. 'It helped them get the first step on the festival ladder,' says Cheah.

This year, 11 features are competing for the Silver Screen Award for Best Asian Feature and 53 will compete for the Best Singapore Short.

The festival opened on Wednesday with a screening of Sri Lankan director Prasanna Jayakody's feature film debut, Sankara, a Buddhist fable about desire and non-attachment.

Among the many themed programmes, there's one dedicated to Middle Eastern cinema under the banner the Secret Life of Arabia, with films from Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia and Kuwait. Of note are Shawkat Amin Korki's Crossing the Dust, which assesses the short-lived euphoria after the US military intervention in Iraq; Ghassan Salhab's clever inversion of the vampire film genre into a treatise on why Lebanon is debilitated in The Last Man; and a tribute to Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1988. Thirty-eight of his novels and short stories have been adapted into films, many reflecting Cairo's bustle.

After the success of last year's Watching Music, Hearing Movies programme, the festival continues with another film and music programme. This year's includes Paul Rachman's exhaustive American Hardcore for fans of hardcore punk; Sam Dunn's Metal: A Head Banger's Journey; and - in the free programme - an 11-film retrospective of New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. These are must-sees for all students of film, says Cheah. Organisers hope the free section will help with 'maturing the roots of the next generation of film fans'.

Bringing international distributors to show films at the festival hasn't always been easy.

'In the early years of the festival, distributors didn't want to send films to Singapore because of our reputation for censorship,' Cheah says. However, this perception has changed over the years. Typically, a couple of films will be withdrawn every year. This year, Danish director Andrea Morgenthaler's animated film about the death of a porn actress, Princess, which opened Cannes' Director's Fortnight last year, has been withdrawn.

'We've always tried to uphold the principle that the festival should be a free space and the films shouldn't be cut,' Cheah says. 'Unfortunately, in Singapore, many films are subjects to cuts, even adult films with an R-21 rating. When the censors want to cut the film, we inform the distributor and there's a joint decision on whether to withdraw it. It's been a frustrating journey.'

Paradoxically, the festival will screen a documentary, Apa Khabar Orang Kampung (Village People Radio Show), by Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad. Banned in Malaysia, it features interviews with dozens of members of the banned Communist Party of Malaya, who now live in exile in southern Thailand.