Leading the pack is Japanese film guru Takeshi Kitano's Achilles and the Tortoise, about an artist's yearning for fame.

It is one of five of the 21 films selected for this year's Mostra with an Asian connection.

Although Kitano's film could be set almost anywhere, the Japanese backdrop invites the eccentricity that Kitano so handily exploits.

Directing himself in the lead role, he throws himself into his art, at one point literally hurling himself onto a canvas wearing jumpsuits daubed with a succession of colours.

This episode is one of the least bizarre (or life-threatening) artistic adventures in the film.

Inju, the Beast in the Shadow by French director Barbet Schroeder takes the viewer to a more classical Japan, though the genre belongs to America.

'It's a Japanese film that is also an American thriller', said the Iranian-born Schroeder, nominated for an Oscar for his 1990 drama Reversal of Fortune.

In the film, a cocky French novelist comes to Japan to promote his book and falls in love with a geisha, who tells him she has received death threats from her lover.

Lika Minamoto, who plays the geisha, recounted getting used to wearing a kimono and learning the ritual dance that she performed in the film.

'Usually people from the outside (of the geisha world) are not allowed to learn to dance,' she told a news conference, adding that her performance was the first of its kind to be included in a major feature film.

A third Asian-themed movie, Hong Kong director Yu Lik-wai's gritty Plastic City, is set in Brazil, in the violent Liberdade neighbourhood of Sao Paulo, home to the world's largest immigrant Japanese community.

A Chinese outlaw and his adoptive son control a counterfeit goods racket until the police and local mafia join forces to shut them down.

Still to come are two animated films, Hayao Miyazaki's watery fantasy Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea and Mamoru Oshii's modern parable The Sky Crawlers.

Last year's Golden Lion went to Chinese director Ang Lee for his steamy spy thriller Lust, Caution - two years after he won the top prize for his breakthrough gay western Brokeback Mountain. -- AFP