Maybe there’s someplace else you could find Matchbox Twenty frontman Rob Thomas sharing space with Orson Welles, Black Snake Moan director Craig Brewer, a group of “real Beverly Hillbillies” and a possible religious totem found in a Nashville junk shop. But it’ll be a lot easier just to attend the upcoming Nashville Film Festival, which features all of them and more.

The NaFF offered a sneak peek at the lineup for its 38th annual showcase of features, documentaries and shorts from around the world, coming April 19-26 to Regal’s Green Hills megaplex. Selected from more than 1,700 entries, the films announced so far in this year’s fest include world premieres and works by Nashville filmmakers as well as favorites from the international festival circuit.

“There were some really difficult decisions this year,” says Brian Gordon, now in his seventh year as the NaFF’s artistic director. “The quality of submissions overall is better. Definitely the things that make it to the finals are better.”

In addition to the already announced opening-night film, My Secret Record: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Biz—a fly-on-the-wall doc about the music-business machinery behind Thomas’ platinum solo debut, with star Thomas and director Gillian Grisman on hand for the world premiere—the fest unveiled 30 confirmed features ranging from quirky romantic comedies to a portfolio of remarkable documentaries.

First off, Nashville audiences will get a crack at two of the movies that topped the Film Comment and Indiewire polls of the best unreleased films of 2006. Commissioned for the “New Crowned Hope” festival in Vienna to celebrate Mozart’s 250th birthday, Syndromes and a Century is another of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s sensually immersive experiments in bifurcated storytelling, this one split between a jungle clinic and a sterile big-city hospital. Colossal Youth, by Portugal’s Pedro Costa, depicts the inhabitants of a Lisbon slum in still-lifes that have the sumptuous lighting of Old Masters.

Closer to home, the American indie Swedish Auto, starring Lukas Haas and January Jones, drew raves from Variety with its story of a small-town romance between two misfits. The trade paper also gave a hearty thumbs-up to Nina Menkes’ “radical and beautiful” drama Phantom Love, produced and scored respectively by native Nashvillians Kevin and Rich Ragsdale. At Sundance this year, the New Zealand geek-love comedy Eagle vs. Shark picked up comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite, while the Irish comedy-drama Small Engine Repair features Iain Glen from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider as an aspiring country-music singer reduced to living in his buddy’s mower-repair garage. Listen for Bobby Bare Jr., Todd Snider, the Silver Jews and John Prine on the soundtrack.

Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer, who showed his breakout hit Hustle & Flow at NaFF in 2005, has an unusual project in this year’s fest. “Steppin’ in the Hood” is a short Brewer shot last July with kids from Nashville’s Preston Taylor housing project, as detailed last year in a Scene cover story (“Inner-City Cinema,” July 27, 2006). Brewer directed, while the script, performances and crew came from teens at the Preston Taylor Boys & Girls Club YMCA, part of an outreach program sponsored by the festival. The NaFF will host the premiere of the short, along with a making-of doc covering the raucous and often contentious filming process.

OK, you’ve made a movie; now how do you get it into theaters? Two rising indie talents, coming from different corners of the marketplace, will share their thoughts. With his Atlanta production company Rainforest Films, Rob Hardy had the No. 1 movie in the country earlier this year with the musical drama Stomp the Yard. The former Nashvillian will be on hand to show his erotic thriller Motives 2, starring Vivica A. Fox, and to discuss his success with self-distribution. Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg will appear with his latest film, Hannah Takes the Stairs, made with an ensemble that includes SpongeBob SquarePants writer Kent Osborne, actress Greta Gerwig, director Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation) and actor-producer Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair).

Of the feature-length documentaries, the one most likely to stir up controversy is Lake of Fire, an excellent consideration of the abortion issue by American History X director Tony Kaye. Beautifully (and ironically) shot in black-and-white over 17 years, the film leaves no position unchallenged: it talks to pro-choice and anti-abortion zealots, incorporates a spectrum of voices from Noam Chomsky to Nat Hentoff to mad-dog pro-life activist Randall Terry, and juxtaposes murdered clinic workers with the clearly human remains of aborted fetuses. The result stunned audiences at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where it became a word-of-mouth sensation among crowds and critics.

Surrounding Lake of Fire are several hot-button docs from last month’s Sundance Film Festival. Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America, by Two Towns of Jasper co-director Marco Williams, visits three all-white burghs in Georgia, Arkansas and Missouri that basically forced black residents away at gunpoint; the question of reparations produces hard feelings but no easy answers. Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, whose The Trials of Darryl Hunt won top honors at last year’s NaFF, return with the acclaimed The Devil Came on Horseback, an account of ex-Marine Brian Steidle’s attempts to alert the West to the Janjaweed militia’s atrocities in Darfur.

Other NaFF documentaries cover topics ranging from current events to film history. John Laurence’s I Am an American Soldier follows a Fort Campbell battalion through basic training all the way to its deployment in Iraq. The Sundance audience-award winner In the Shadow of the Moon recounts the Apollo space program through copious archival footage and the surviving astronauts’ own reminiscences. Orson Welles’ hotly debated legacy gets a closer look in Dominik and Jakov Sedlar’s Searching for Orson, which among others enlists Welles’ late-career muse Oja Kodar, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and Steven Spielberg in a consideration of his many unfinished projects. For a different kind of career overview, Matthew Kennedy: One Man’s Journey, directed by Kennedy’s daughter Nina, offers a loving tribute to the musical director who shepherded the Fisk Jubilee Singers through the stormiest years of the civil rights movement.

When you see Dub Cornett’s name attached to a project, you know it’s going to light cherry bombs under your feet. The Nashville behind-the-scenes fixture has two films in this year’s lineup, and both sound like must-sees. The True Adventures of the Real Beverly Hillbillies amounts to a partial defense of Cornett’s roundly clobbered, misunderstood attempt a few years back to produce a reality show starring a group of real-life Clampetts. Cornett, whose own roots are holler-deep, retaliates by taking an Appalachian family to Hollywood and showing the city’s largesse and class divisions through their eyes.

Early word, though, suggests that Cornett’s other entry may be a festival highlight. The Urim and Thummim, by Cornett and Dancing Outlaw documentarian Jacob Young, tells the true story of two Kentucky men who happened upon a trinket in a Nashville thrift store and grew convinced the gewgaw was a portal to Old Testament visions. Gordon says the film becomes “almost Borat-like” as the men approach Vanderbilt theologians with their treasure, seeking confirmation of its powers.

As the fest’s 1,700 entries poured in, did they indicate any trends in indie filmmaking, or at least give some sign of its pulse? As at other fests, Gordon says, there was a clutter of “really convoluted plots that all come together at the end, at the expense of character development.” (Thanks, Crash.) More heartening, he adds, is continued growth in the quality of digital filmmaking. “It’s very obvious that people are taking the same care planning shots and scripting that they would with film,” he says.