The biggest topic of controversy at last week’s Nashville Film Festival wasn’t an entry or an award selection. It was the festival logo and its related trailer. The trailer was especially notorious: It ran before every single screening and by week’s end drew the kind of groans that hadn’t been heard since Regal wore out the Pepsi Girl clip. Looking at the logo—a tyke on a tire swing, silhouetted under a welcoming tree—a woman in the Green Hills lobby expressed the consensus view: “What does this have to do with movies?”

:Good question. Yet as an emblem of Nashville’s unresolvable identity crisis—are we city or country? rural or industrial? traditional or progressive?—the logo speaks volumes about the city and the festival that represents it. A regional film festival has to balance high standards and hometown boosterism. In years past, that balancing act has sometimes resembled a see-saw with feathers at one end and a concrete block on the other. Should the NFF, now in its 34th year, be a celebration of cinematic excellence or a local talent show?

As this year’s festival proved, it can comfortably be both. An unprecedented outpouring of work from Tennessee filmmakers—including two features and at least two feature-length documentaries—ran alongside the NFF’s strongest slate yet of international discoveries and festival-circuit favorites. And attendance soared. Despite concerns about losing viewers to other events the same weekend, early estimates set the NFF’s audience at 14,500—nearly a 40-percent increase over last year. What’s more, the first-time festivalgoers were a broad group. The Jimmy Martin doc King of Bluegrass drew a completely different audience from the African American dignitaries at Charlie’s War, even if few who attended either premiere were seen at other films.

Not coincidentally, those two films supplied almost all of the NFF’s celebrity quotient. An audience of bluegrass legends, including members of the Scruggs family and a frail but undimmed Mac Wiseman, turned out to greet Martin’s larger-than-life entry from a tour bus the size of a dry-docked ocean liner. At Charlie’s War, featured actress Diane Ladd sat undisturbed while a flotilla of anxious Regal Cinemas staffers hovered around Oprah Winfrey and her entourage. Winfrey’s attendance alone, in support of her dad Vernon’s acting debut, guaranteed the NFF national coverage it couldn’t get otherwise, including a segment on her show May 16.

The locally filmed and generated Charlie’s War wasn’t an unmitigated disaster like last year’s notorious NFF stinkbomb Colored Eggs: It has evocative World War II period detail, great locations, handsome cinematography and engaging performances by its young leads. But its script—a choppy, muddled mix of Southern Gothic memory play and repressed-trauma whodunit—should never have been filmed without significant rewrites. Nevertheless, it filled a record eight screenings to capacity.

By contrast, the fest’s other locally generated feature, A.W. Vidmer’s comparatively unheralded Stuey, was a modest and encouraging success. Vidmer’s well-paced biopic of poker legend Stu Ungar suffers from a gimmicky flashback structure and a squeamishness about its hero’s renowned dark side. But it has a live-wire lead in Michael Imperioli, who gets across an addict’s insatiable craving for exhilaration and punishment whether it’s dealt by coke or cards. Not only did Stuey walk off with the festival’s Audience Choice Award, Vidmer was seen huddled with Regal execs about getting the movie in theaters.

If Stuey’s overall professionalism raises the bar for Nashville-based features, the festival’s usually underwhelming Tennessee Film Night was graced by some strong entries. Kevin Shaw’s “Jeremiah Strong,” with Barry Scott’s uncompromising performance as a desperate street dweller, showed a major improvement over his previous short “How I Got Over,” thanks to pungent location shooting, gritty texture, and stunning widescreen images. It won the festival’s Tennessee Spirit Award, and yet it might have been bested by a latecomer: Bobby Garebedian and William Zabka’s “Most,” a beautifully shot, edited and executed Czech-language short about a father’s horrifying choice between personal loss and large-scale catastrophe. Although its local connection was tenuous (executive producer Eric Geadelmann lives here), its level of cinematic command and production values left viewers agog.

While the local programming drew the crowds, the national and international selections gave the NFF its heft. In recent years, viewers have had to look to documentaries for the narrative engagement fiction used to provide, and the sheer storytelling involvement of films as diverse as the spelling-bee crowd-pleaser Spellbound and Jennifer Dworkin’s family epic Love & Diane gave this year’s festival the feel of a watershed.

As for fiction, this was a good year for the NFF to drop the “independent” from its name: The paucity of strong under-the-radar American features was as obvious here as it was last winter at Sundance. Bolstered by Campbell Scott and Hope Davis’ superb performances as husband-and-wife dentists in marital crisis, The Secret Lives of Dentists was the best work in a decade from director Alan Rudolph. At least for its first hour, it’s one of the most knowing and insightful studies of upper-middle-class family life yet on film.

A far chillier portrait of parental responsibility, Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever polarized viewers with its harrowing depiction of an abandoned Russian teen’s descent into the sex trade. Yet those who saw it as forbidding miserabilism, especially compared to the warmth of Moodysson’s previous NFF favorite Together, somehow missed the redeeming empathy and humane restraint of his direction. Other festival highlights included the well-received Japon and Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary, along with a pair of gems shown out of competition, Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen and South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s The Turning Gate.

The selection that may fare best for the NFF’s future, however, was the Japanese sleeper Doing Time, a gentle, haunting account of prison life that came from nowhere to win the festival’s most coveted prize, the DreamMaker Award. It was an inspired choice. The award gives an undistributed film a commercial run in one of Regal’s Los Angeles megaplexes—a qualification for entry in the Academy Awards. By opening the award to a foreign film—one that, judging from raves in CinemaScope and Film Comment, is set for a stateside breakout—the festival has new leverage to attract top movies early in their festival run. Like the awarding of this year’s Freedom in Film Award to stalwart indie producer Christine Vachon (Far From Heaven), it’s a smart, discerning choice that greatly boosts the festival’s credibility.

Aside from the noticeable absence of a director retrospective, the few gripes voiced about this year’s fest mostly concerned procedure and planning. No one seemed to appreciate the scheduling switch from mid-June to early May, made to accommodate the summer blockbuster season. The NFF web site, a crucial aspect of advance sales, was either MIA or out of commission until the week before the festival. Several screenings experienced minor projection glitches. Jennifer Stoughton, a longtime festivalgoer who bought tickets for 26 films, bemoaned the lack of services for patrons. Her main suggestion, widely seconded, was for some kind of downstairs food court to supplement Regal’s hot dogs and nachos.

And then there’s that logo, which I confess doesn’t bother me much. It smacks of homespun hospitality, and that’s what seemed to set the Nashville Film Festival apart for visiting filmmakers. Not only did the NFF scoop New York’s splashy Tribeca Film Festival with the North American premiere of the Iraqi documentary Baghdad On/Off, its director, Saad Salman, was thrilled with his Music City stay. Directors Mark Moormann (whose wonderful Tom Dowd and the Language of Music took the audience award for documentaries), Jeff Krulik (Hitler’s Hat) and Laura Nix (The Politics of Fur) mentioned their delight at the friendliness and receptiveness of Nashville audiences. And an executive with Manhattan Pictures, who came with The Secret Lives of Dentists, said it was a pleasure to attend a film festival and hear people discussing movies instead of deals.

So don’t throw away that tree and tire swing just yet. Maybe it’ll keep us honest.