Amongst a flood of festivals, the East End Film Festival – created in partnership with Tower Hamlets Council, but now acting independent of it – always feels a little different. Detailing their aims, the festival states their goals are: “using non-cinema venues, engaging with diverse audiences, supporting emerging filmmakers, breaking boundaries with cross-arts & music events, premiering vital new films.” Few festivals can describe their objectives as lucidly as that. Ensuring these aims are acted upon, their 2017 edition comes with two new additions. Alongside the film and event programmes, the festival is also partnering with the University of East London to provide year round education opportunities, but the most exciting new development for this year, however, is the announcement of the EEFF Transit Award, a £10,000 development award for a second time directors, to be granted in time for EEFF 2018. In the meantime however, the focus is on the films already around, with the festival showcasing the best of independent filmmaking both local and international. We picked five events from their packed, five weekend long programme.

Novel and noble, the ‘Films for Food’ screenings are available to attend for free in exchange for a donation of non-perishable food, to be gifted to Tower Hamlets Food Bank. Catch one of two classic musicals, with both West Side Story and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang playing at the Old Spitalfields Market, and help fill the borough’s food banks letting them feed those in need. See either, or both, at the festival’s opening weekend. As the festival noted, West Side Story in particular seems an apt choice for this screening concept, as a “story of a changing city and how love can overcome division”.

Those who won’t be making it to Sheffield for Doc/Fest can see two of what look to be highlights of the festival in London with EEFF. Worthwhile will be City of Ghosts, the much lauded new film from Oscar nominated, Emmy winning Matthew Heinemann (Cartel Land), an account of the director’s time spent embedded within a group of Syrian citizen journalists reporting on ISIS. Alternatively, Ghost Hunting, a Berlinale winner, has former inmates of the Al-Moskobiya interrogation centre recreating their experiences in a mock prison as a form of group therapy. Both have been reported to be intense, searing and difficult portraits of conflict areas that offer new perspectives and crucial insights.

Presented by A/V label Psyche Tropes, the ‘A Creak in Time‘ programme looks intriguing. Focusing on “celluloid, synaesthetic intersections and abstract form’, this expanded cinema series includes films with analogue visuals, synth and sound. Alongside films and performances across 8mm, 16mm, programmed LED lights and live sonics from Sally Golding, Merkaba Macabre and Ian Helliwell, Steven Mcinnerney’s A Creak in Time will set imagery showing “microscopic topography to the vast distances of the cosmos” against live reel-to-reel tape manipulations from Howlround. Taking place in the atmospheric confines of the St Johns church, performance fans can also see live film-music-performance event, EDITH there, which will mix spoken word from Iain Sinclair, with music and soundscapes by David Aylward, Claudia Barton, Jem Finer and imagery from Andrew Kötting.

Sinclair heads, budding psychogeographers and landscape ponderers might also want head to ‘In Place‘, a trio of mid length landscape portraits that together “evoke a keen sense of place and space.” Amongst them, visit a Stockholm Cold War-era bunker repurposed as a data storage centre in White Mountain, explore deep, ruminative and traumatic landscapes of the mind in Waterfall, and travel through East London’s many bridge crossings in Lea River Bridges.

Many of the highlights in the short film selections may be found in the New Queer Visions programmes, as they look to be some of the more interesting and eclectic on offer. In ‘Sign of the Times‘, a collection of short films themed around d/Deaf queer stories, all with HOH subtitles. Amongst them, SP’r Rob Savage’s Sundance smash Dawn of the Deaf, and docmaker Natalia Kouneli’s Silent Laughs. In ‘They Came From the Shadows‘, a “welter of micro-transgressions, no-frills chills and twisted voices from the other(ing) side,” including Jason Bradbury’s fashion flick Nightwalkers, a new short from You and the Night director Yann Gonzales, Les Iles, and a 35mm projection of rare & campy film trailers. Or in ‘Two’s Company‘ “queer eyes venture beyond the sidelines to set things straight”. Most vital perhaps, ‘From Russia With Love‘ offers a selection of LGBT films, documentaries and videos from Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, with all proceeds raised going to Gay Alliance Ukraine and the Russian LGBT Network.