Across the metropolitan galaxy of cinematic obsession, in a city that unspools a new film festival every week, there is nothing quite as giddily in love with the mad, marvelous insanity of movies as the New York Asian Film Festival. It’s not an excuse for a night out. It’s more like a state of being, a way to live, a tao.

Mushrooming into a 43-film, 17-day marathon in its seventh year, what began as a modest celebration of genre enthusiasm has become as formidable as Choi Min-sik’s hammer-wielding amnesiac in Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film “Oldboy,” the kind of sensational, cult-inspiring film that the festival revels in presenting.

The 2008 edition — which begins tonight at IFC Center and closes July 6 as it dovetails into the Japan Society’s own mini-festival, dubbed Japan Cuts — is made up almost exclusively of premieres. One can find everything from anime- and manga-inspired serials (Hideo Nakata’s “L: Change the World”) to old-school Thai epics (Chatrichalerm Yukol’s “King Naresuan”) to an anticipated documentary about the abuse routinely heaped on Korean stuntmen (Jung Byoung-Gul’s “Action Boys”).

Some of the iconic names include Takashi Miike (“Sukiyaki Western Django”), Hong Kong action king Johnnie To (“Mad Detective,” “Sparrow”), and Koji Wakamatsu (“United Red Army”), the renegade Japanese director of such 1960s pinku provocations as “Go, Go Second Time Virgin” and “The Embryo Hunts in Secret.”

“They aren’t movies that are trying to appeal to everyone,” one of five programmers in the festival’s brain trust, Marc Walkow, said, trying to summarize what makes Asian cinema, despite the cyclical ups and downs of individual national film industries and genres, so perversely addictive.

Grady Hendrix, a festival founder and a film critic for The New York Sun, added: “During the summer, the American film industry over-markets its movies, and everything is based on things that already exist.” But rather than groan about it, the intrepid moviegoer can jump to a parallel film industry, where even the most monotonously generic fare can suddenly seem fresh and weird. “It’s like changing the channel,” Mr. Hendrix said. “It’ll be just as good, if not better, than ‘Indiana Jones 4.’ We’re cherry-picking all the big, fat, exciting movies from these other industries. If you’re sick of ‘Sex and the City,’ change the channel.”

That’s pretty much how the festival began. In 1999, the producing organization Subway Cinema was founded by a small group of friends who wanted to feed their unconventional moviegoing habits.

“It was after the last movie theater in Chinatown — the Movie Palace — closed,” another NYAFF director, Goran Topalovic, said. They couldn’t save the theater, but collectively they could promote the kinds of movies they had gone to see in Chinatown, which ran the gamut from kung-fu epics to gangster melodramas.

Action is one notable gateway into contemporary Asian cult cinema, though the Hong Kong glory days of John Woo are long gone. Likewise, the once-prolific genre of Japanese suspense flicks known as J-horror has been subsumed by tepid Hollywood remakes. Lately, a new generation of fans has been energized by the popularity of anime and manga adaptations such as the “Death Note” series, though as Mr. Walkow noted, much recent Japanese fare also has been defined by its fuzzy attitude about genre, with offbeat comedies that can skew strangely profound as their heroes ponder the amorphous state of existence.

The NYAFF is a good way to measure what’s hot, and what’s not, in the East. The creative juices in Korea’s film industry, for example, are running low these days on account of overcommercialization, Mr. Topalovic noted. “The Butcher,” which is likely to be the festival’s most disturbing entry, arrives from South Korea as practically an underground movie. Kim Jin-Won’s gnarly debut is a grainy variation on the snuff-film dynamics of “Saw” and “Hostel” — visceral enough to prompt festival organizers to offer vomit bags at its midnight screenings. Yet, it could also be an allegory about the cynical state of the South Korean film industry itself.

“Korea makes these violent movies designed to go to foreign markets,” Mr. Topalovic said. “So Park Chan-wook makes a romantic comedy and he couldn’t sell it. So this might be a movie about Koreans making snuff films for overseas audiences.”

No such jaded attitudes infect the NYAFF base. Even with corporate sponsorship, the festival remains a homegrown affair.

“Here’s our big sponsor,” Mr. Hendrix, who was sharing a table at a tavern on St. Mark’s Place, said. He pulled out his wallet. “It’s my credit card. It’s almost all done on our credit cards. It’s so sad.”

Likewise, Mr. Walkow said, everyone involved in constructing the program has traveled around the world at their own expense, catching movies firsthand. “If you’re not going to some festival and watching the freaking movies,” he said, “then you’re not a film programmer.”

Because it’s a festival organized by zealots who have no one else to please but themselves — and, by extension, other zealots who share their tastes — the event boasts a quirky integrity and a thoughtful depth of selections. “The Most Beautiful Night in the World” marks a delightful generational transition, as Japanese filmmaker Daisuke Tengan carries on much of the cockeyed wit and screwball anthropology of his father, the iconic director Shohei Imamura — and throws in a climactic 50-person orgy. Joko Anwar’s “Kala” suggests Indonesia has more going on than ceremonial ritual, as its ambitious film noir establishes a parallel reality seemingly worthy of Philip K. Dick. Hitoshi Matsumoto’s “Dainipponjin,” which translates to “Big Man Japan,” a faux-documentary that may test viewers’ patience but closes with the funniest half-hour of superhero spoof you’re likely to see.

After this, “Iron Man” will look like so much crumpled tinfoil. “These movies,” Mr. Hendrix promised, “will melt your face off.”

For more information, visit subwaycinema.com or IFC Center (323 Sixth Ave. at West 3rd Street, 212-924-7771).