The Nashville Film Festival isn’t huge, like Sundance or Toronto. Nor is it tiny, like the many regional festivals that have sprouted in the past 10 years like mushrooms after rain. What the Nashville Film Festival is, mostly, is ours. It reflects our identity as Music City, with an ever-expanding section of films devoted to bluegrass, country and beyond. It has a makeup as diverse as our own population, with selections targeted to Nashville’s thriving Mexican and Kurdish communities. Its audiences—celebrities, college kids, churchgoers, out-of-towners—could be the line outside Pancake Pantry any given Saturday.

There’s just a lot more of it. Last year, for the first time in its 39-year history, the Nashville Film Festival broke the 20,000 attendance mark. When it opens this Thursday, April 17, for a week’s run at Regal’s Green Hills megaplex, another boost in attendance is likely. Whether you’ve been every year since the festival was called Sinking Creek, back at Vanderbilt throughout the 1970s, or you’re going for the first time, you could probably use some help sorting through the crowds, the tickets, and above all, dozens of different programming blocks devoted to features, documentaries, panels and workshops.

If so, you’re in the right place. Below, the Scene’s writers offer previews of this year’s NaFF attractions day by day, pointing out films you shouldn’t miss (as well as some you can safely skip). Along with those, we offer some practical tips for getting the most out of the festival. First, buy advance tickets, either at the downstairs Green Hills festival office or online at nashvillefilmfestival.org. Weekday matinees rarely fill to capacity, but weekend shows (especially at night) or any film featuring visiting celebrities will sell out long before showtime. The same is often true of movies showing only once at the festival: Usually, that means the film is something special, or at least has theatrical distribution. Plan accordingly.

Then take advantage of the social opportunities a festival provides—among them the once-a-year chance to have excited, animated conversations with hundreds of movie-mad viewers and filmmakers. Filmmakers tend to congregate on the patio outside the Green Hills box office and at the tables near the VIP area; audiences congest the lobby in lines snaking in every direction. Ask people what they’ve seen—by riding the buzz, you’ll likely find something interesting you wouldn’t know about otherwise.

And with that, enjoy the show.

☛ = Strongly recommended

THURSDAY, 17TH

THE DEAL (7 p.m.) Whenever anyone makes their “love letter to Hollywood,” be warned—all such correspondences tend to be roughly the same. Co-written by star William H. Macy, the independently financed The Deal reveals exactly nothing new: The biz is crooked, execs like it rough, art becomes crap, yada yada. It just happens to do it sprightlier than most. The shockingly winning duo of Macy and Meg Ryan play a producer and an exec pummeling a loving script about British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli into a Jewish-themed action vehicle for recent convert LL Cool J. Genial stuff, but surely Macy didn’t do Wild Hogs for this. Macy, co-star Jason Ritter, and director Steven Schachter will attend. (Matt Prigge)

SEARCHERS 2.0 (7:30 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. April 18) Repo Man director Alex Cox knows the spaghetti Western better than anyone not named Sergio, and his appealingly scroungy road movie pays loving homage. Longtime Cox stock players Del Zamora and Ed Pansullo play former character actors who set out for Monument Valley, where they plan to bushwhack a Golden Age screenwriter (Sy Richardson) who mistreated them both as kids. The two bicker and banter over Al Gore, the Iraq War and Hollywood lore against a backdrop of desert vistas and blue-highways Americana, while the deliberately minor shot-on-video movie takes in the slow fade of the mythic West. The shaggy, shambling yarn climaxes with a Leone-trivia face-off that, like the movie, memorializes the forgotten heroes buried in the IMDB’s Boot Hill. (If ya got it in ya, pilgrim, take the trivia challenge at searchers2.com.) Watch for a cameo by a real outlaw, executive producer Roger Corman. (Jim Ridley)

SEARCHERS 2.0

TWO EMBRACES (8 p.m.; also 2 p.m. April 18) With his debut film, Enrique Begne joins the ranks of Mexican directors making poetic, elliptical movies about eclectic groups of strangers. Two Embraces is one of the better examples of the genre, even though its two stories—one about a teenager who falls in love with a surly grocery clerk, and one about a grumpy cab driver who gets involved in a passenger’s life—never seem to connect up cleanly, aside from the recurrence of disease, disgruntlement and near-desperate hugs. Still, the movie looks amazing, with shifting film stocks and startling rack-focus effects that indicate subtle changes in perception. And Two Embraces delivers this hopeful message: Even people who annoy you can be comforting to have around. In Spanish with subtitles. (Noel Murray)

☛ THE ART OF NEGATIVE THINKING (9:30 p.m.; also 7:30 p.m. April 19) This subdued black comedy is the debut feature from writer-director Bård Breien. Tori (Kjersti Holmen), a stern state social worker, has been called by a despondent wife to the home of Geirr (Fridtjov Såheim), who hasn’t left the house for two years since an automobile accident put him in a wheelchair. He spends his days alone in his room getting high, listening to Johnny Cash, watching Vietnam War movies and playing with an enormous loaded revolver. When Tori shows up with her positive-thought therapy group—including an ever-smiling quadriplegic and her husband, a stroke victim and a fallen-from-grace socialite—Geirr hijacks the group and leads them through a catharsis of negativity that proves sugar-coating your problems doesn’t make them go away. In Norwegian with subtitles. (Brent Rolen)

☛ YOU, THE LIVING (9:45 p.m.; also 9:15 p.m. April 18) Fans of Terry Gilliam and especially the serenely bizarre late comedies of Luis Buñuel are directed post-haste to the work of Sweden’s Roy Andersson, whose apocalyptic 2000 black comedy Songs From the Second Floor is among the best movies of the past decade never to play Nashville. This is roughly Andersson’s equivalent to Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty: a sketchbook of dreams within dreams, prankish sight gags and complexly orchestrated long takes linked by dour dark humor and intimations of impending doom. Yet the movie is buoyed by its left-field musical numbers and by Andersson’s Tati-like mastery of spatial slapstick—capped by a showstopper sequence involving that old life-of-the-party last resort, the pull-the-tablecloth trick. It may be the hardest I’ve laughed since the first Naked Gun. In Swedish with subtitles. (Jim Ridley)

YOU, THE LIVING

FRIDAY, 18TH

☛ YOUNG@HEART (1:15 p.m.; also 5 p.m. April 21) Stephen Walker’s must-see documentary profiles the Young at Heart Chorus of Northhampton, Mass., a choir of senior citizens (average age: 81) who spend their golden years rehearsing and performing rock tunes by the likes of The Clash, Sonic Youth and Coldplay. Their song choices (perfectly selected by their heroic director Bob Cilman) result in performances that are surprisingly free of irony: An exuberant “I Feel Good” celebrates the singers’ passion for life, while a performance of “Forever Young” nearly brings a jailful of inmates to tears. Even as fellow members fade suddenly into illness and death, the chorus gives its members a reason to live that they embrace with wisdom and grace. Movies don’t get much more inspiring than this. (Sam Smith)

YOUNG@HEART

☛ JUMP! (4:15 p.m.; also 3:15 p.m. April 19) Where Spellbound and Mad Hot Ballroom surveyed whiz-kid competitors in spelling and dance, Helen Hood Scheer’s entertaining doc follows the trend with a look at the best young jump-ropers in the world. Scheer focuses on five U.S. teams training for regional, national and worldwide honors, covering a range of ages, races and religions. All her subjects possess Olympics-ready commitment and competitive spirit, particularly the 12-year-old speed-jumper Tori. And the sport itself, unrestricted by standardized rules, proves to be not only an athletic test but also a ballet of creative choreography—making this a surefire audience-pleaser even for those who get winded climbing stairs. Scheer will attend, and live rope-jumping demonstrations are planned throughout the weekend. (Sam Smith)

JUMP!

URBAN ASSAULT: ESCAPE FROM POVERTY (6:45 p.m.; also 4:15 p.m. April 24) “The change in my life came the day I got shot,” says Taras Carter. Bound for revenge, he pointed a .38 long-barrel at the shooter but had a change of heart—and now they’re brothers-in-law. So opens Rob McDonald Jr.’s documentary about poverty in inner-city Nashville—an awkwardly organized jumble of statistics, stories, snapshots and solutions that nevertheless offers a revealing glimpse of life below the poverty line, from the Edgehill projects to East Nashville. The real standout is spunky Star (“not a statistic”) Martin, who overcame neighborhood shootings and a rape at age 11 to graduate high school, attend college and set her sights on the Oval Office. Only a fool would bet against her—even if the doc itself sometimes seems best suited for an after-church food drive. McDonald will attend. (Tony Youngblood)

☛ AMERICAN TEEN (7 p.m.) A Sundance sensation, Nanette Burstein’s sharply felt documentary about Warsaw, Ind., high-school seniors visits the hallways, bedrooms and basements where formative years are spent and finds things are not all that different regardless of when one is a teenager. The primary participants resemble their fictional teen-movie analogues—Hannah, the artistic outsider; popular mean girl Megan; Colin, the star basketball player in a hoops-mad community; and lovelorn band geek Jake—but are depicted with greater complexity than their Central Casting counterparts. High school years are frequently idealized, but Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) captures teenage angst and hope with such emotional potency that her film is unlikely to make viewers wistful. (Mark Pfeiffer)

☛ THROW DOWN YOUR HEART (7:15 p.m.) Banjo master Bela Fleck travels to Uganda, Tanzania, The Gambia and Mali to find the roots of his instrument and, more importantly, to meet and play with the various regions’ master musicians. That Fleck is shy and self-effacing works to enhance the film’s ultimate theme: music as the universal language. If this sounds like clichéd, feel-good territory, don’t be fooled. There are some truly stunning musical moments, including scenes of Fleck jamming with astounding Malian guitarist Djelimady Tounkara and engaging in a John Lee Hooker-worthy blues duel with n’goni master Bassekou Kouyate. Director Sascha Paladino wisely keeps the focus on the African musicians, and the sound recording is superb, capturing thumb pianos, akonting, kamelengoni, drums and enormous marimbas in all their rough-hewn glory. Fleck will attend. (Jack Silverman)

THROW DOWN YOUR HEART

☛ TAKING ROOT: THE VISION OF WANGARI MAATHAI (7:30 p.m.) Lisa Merton and Alan Dater’s documentary shows how one person can change the face of the Earth, giving environmentalism and activism a face other than Al Gore or Michael Moore. That person is Wangari Maathai, a native Kenyan who founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 to inspire local women to replenish the once thriving forests surrounding their villages. Defying the forces of colonialism and the crown-backed Moi government, the U.S.-educated Matthai began teaching the people about their rights and spoke out against Kenya’s ruling dictatorship at enormous personal risk. From this affectionate, rousing portrait, the Nobel Prize winner emerges as a warm, humble, but unstoppable advocate for human rights—proof that one small voice of dissent can shake nations. It’s news we need to hear. Merton and Dater will attend. (Brian Miles)

☛ PROPHETS RISING (9 p.m.) In their unsettling doc—which could have been titled Sympathy for the Angel—veteran Nashville filmmakers Loree Gold and Jane Pittman examine the groundswell of evangelical fervor in “the Protestant Vatican” without overt editorializing or skepticism. (From the movie’s first shot—a woman in angel duds flapping around a Middle Tennessee barnyard—many will feel none is needed.) Inspired, according to Gold, by P.J. Tobia’s 2006 Scene cover story of the same name, the doc profiles (among others) singer Sandy Powell, a dynamo who’s only slightly altered her secular stage show of “Great Balls of Fire,” and author James Goll, a rising star whose wife is facing a struggle with cancer. There are no rebuttal witnesses or outside observers to challenge, say, the push to convert Jews—one can imagine the outspoken and proudly Jewish Gold biting down on her lens cap—just the occasional note of cautious ambivalence in Minton Sparks’ drawled narration. The result is a movie that both sides may claim as ammunition. Gold, Pittman and several of their subjects will attend. (Jim Ridley)

☛ WERE THE WORLD MINE (9:30 p.m.) When Timothy (Tanner Cohen), the bullied gay kid in an all-boy high school, is assigned the role of Puck in their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he discovers the potion to create a magical pansy (of course) that turns his closed-minded peers and townspeople gay. Director Thomas Gustafson adapted his award-winning short musical “Fairies” into a full-length version that is even gayer than High School Musical. While it relies on stereotypes and is a bit heavy-handed in its message of acceptance, this is more the result of a still-intolerant culture where the teasing that Timothy endures is itself a fairy tale compared to the daily brutality some gay teenagers face. With lavish fantasy sequences and beautiful, emotive music, it’s the perfect dream for a mid-spring night. Gustafson will attend. (Brent Rolen)

WERE THE WORLD MINE

TEENAGE TUPELO (10:30 p.m.) You may remember J. Michael McCarthy from such films as Superstarlet A.D. and Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis. But you won’t forget the Russ Meyer of Memphis after seeing his 1995 saga of sin, sex, stripping, Sapphic lust and Scopitones. Stamped with the sleaze seal of approval by associate producer and exploitation legend David F. Friedman, McCarthy’s grainy-as-Kansas trash orgy looks and sounds like the audio-visual component of Satan’s bachelor party circa 1965, with a dual role for buxom big-haired bombshell D’Lana Tunnell as a rockabilly stud’s impregnated conquest and an exotic dancer with a posse of ass-kicking lesbian worshippers. And yes, that’s Scene contributor Edd Hurt as the director’s surrogate. McCarthy will attend. (Jim Ridley)

SATURDAY, 19TH

KINGS (12:15 p.m.) In the late 1970s, six friends leave Ireland’s impoverished Connemara to find a new life in London, where their paths divide. Thirty years later, they reunite for the wake of friend Jackie, killed by a train on the railway he helped build. Despite an overabundance of “cinematic” flashbacks, Tom Collins’ adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s play The Kings of Kilburn High Road rarely transcends either its stage origins or the conventions of the reunion-film genre. But as Ireland’s first bilingual picture (80 percent is in subtitled Irish-Gaelic), the film is a treat for the ears. And it features brilliant work from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Colm Meaney, Donal O’Kelly, and especially Brendan Conroy, whose award-winning turn as a lug who’s “always on the sidelines” but seethes with masked desperation is the heart of the picture. (Tony Youngblood)

CROSSING THE DUST (1:15 p.m.; also 5 p.m. April 22) Set on the day Saddam Hussein’s statue toppled in Baghdad, writer-director Shawkat Amin Korki’s drama provides an eye-opening Kurdish perspective on the Iraq War, focusing on the travails of two Peshmerga (Kurdish freedom fighters). While hauling rations to their comrades on the frontline, Rashid (Adil Abdolrahmadn) and Azad (Hossein Hasan) take mercy on a lost child unfortunately named Saddam (Abdola Awayd). Ignore the terrible subtitles and concentrate on the movie’s convincing details of everyday life in the war’s early days: avoiding death squads, contending with rolling blackouts, and searching vainly for peace. In English, Kurdish and Arabic with subtitles. (Brian Miles)

☛ FLOW: FOR LOVE OF WATER (2:15 p.m.; also 4:30 p.m. April 22) Fela Kuti once sang “Water No Get Enemy,” but Irena Salina’s alarming documentary Flow argues that we’re an enemy to the water, and that what we’ve been doing with it—polluting, exploiting, stealing from the poor—is slowly killing us. Flow is more an accumulation of facts than an artful film: the less said about the dramatic re-enactments, the better. But Salina’s string of anecdotes about disease-ridden reservoirs, sex-changing fish, and the bilking of third-world communities constitutes an overpowering argument that everyone needs to hear. Just don’t buy any bottled water on your way into the theater. Salina will attend. (Noel Murray)

☛ 45 YEARS OF CANYON CINEMA (3:15 p.m.) This beautifully assembled program hosted by Canyon executive director Dominic Angerame represents a sampling of the old-fashioned, succulently tactile pleasures of 16mm celluloid in the hands of artists in complete control of their medium. Stan Brakhage’s “Delicacies of Molten Horror Synapse” is nothing less than an eight-minute visual grudge match between the aesthetic capabilities of film and television. It’s as close as the man ever got to “video art.” Kenneth Anger is represented by one of his best films, “Eaux D’Artifice,” a ravishing contrapuntal play of solids and fluids. Austrian anarcho-structuralist Martin Arnold’s “Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy” performs staccato turntablist scratching on footage from one of the old Rooney/Garland vehicles, revealing not-so-latent Oedipal comedy with a backbeat. In a somewhat similar vein, Ken Jacobs’s wide-screen wonder “The Georgetown Loop” takes an old “cattle-catcher” film of a turn-of-the-century train rounding a mountain pass and turns it into something of a vertigo-machine. What Arnold does with linear time, Jacobs does to deep filmic space.

Other filmmakers either follow the Brakhage hand-painting tradition, bend, scratch, or otherwise worry the physical surface of the filmstrip. Frédé Devaux’s “Ellipses” removes sections, slices and holes from the film, then “stitches” them back together to form quilt-like composite frames. Donna Cameron is an artist whose work exists at the juncture between film, painting and photography, and “Autumn Leaves” is essentially a motion-painting unfurling on handmade paper emulsion. Finally, Phil Solomon’s “Psalm III: Night of the Meek” is a found-footage symphony of loss and eventual rebirth, subjected to Solomon’s unique and indescribable photochemical treatment processes. Images appear and submerge into a turbulent sea of pure motion and metallurgy; Solomon’s cinema really bears comparison only with the massive Expressionist canvases of Anselm Kiefer. For anyone with even a passing interest in experimental cinema, the entire program is a must-see. (Michael Sicinski)

☛ THE BLACK LIST (4:45 p.m.) The personal is deeply political, and identity is a construct. Those may sound like tired protest chants, but that’s the thoughtful revelation you take from The Black List, an astute work that draws 20 African Americans from a wide swath and just lets them talk. Director/photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (whose Thinking XXX approached porn as portraiture) and former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell collaborated on these intimate vignettes, and their fingerprints never smudge the lens. By letting Chris Rock, Toni Morrison and others tell their own stories, they present a rarely seen portrait of black America—exactly how a national conversation on modern race relations ought to begin. (Tracy Moore)

☛ PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND (5:15 p.m.) Named “Best Experimental Film of 2007” by the National Society of Film Critics, this startlingly moving film takes us on a tour of the United States via its cemeteries, minor monuments, and out-of-the-way historical markers. Over the course of the film, we and the film are tracing a chronological path through the American Left, paying near-silent homage to our comrades, those who fell in battle (slain by police or Pinkertons during strikes; felled by assassins) or those whose lives had simply run their natural course. Inspired by Howard Zinn’s magisterial People’s History of the United States, John Gianvito’s leftist vision is righteously ecumenical, encompassing Eugene V. Debs and Frank Little, Sojourner Truth and Malcolm X, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Cesar Chavez, and many, many others whom mainstream historical accounts have buried far more comprehensively than their undertakers.

In between these sequences, which allow us as viewers the rare opportunity to pay our respects by proxy, Gianvito provides a continual filmic refrain. He tilts his camera up, capturing trees rustling in the wind, light usually peering through the branches. In addition to providing a somber objective-correlative to the film’s consideration of the transience of both human life and populist politics, these sequences offer a vague inkling of a force that may still remain afoot in our world, a voice or a spirit or an idea alight on the wind. The concluding minutes of Profit Motive make this restlessness explicit, in a manner that practically recodes the entire film, shifting its terms from the elegiac to the cyclotronic, a conscious harnessing of available energies. Gianvito’s radical-left optimism looks ahead to a very different “coalition of the willing,” and suddenly seems not just hopeful but possibly prescient. Judge for yourself. Gianvito will attend. (Michael Sicinski)

☛ ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD (5:45 p.m.) Bewitched by a friend’s underwater footage from beneath the Antarctic ice, Werner Herzog (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Grizzly Man) travels south for more. There he finds an “ugly mining town” he’s appalled has ATM machines, aerobics facilities and yoga classes. But he also finds spiritual brethren in a group of scientists and willing social outcasts. Grumpy and proudly Herzogian—one interviewee is credited on-screen as “Philosopher, Forklift Driver”—Encounters starts out diaristic but snowballs, ever so slightly, into a valentine to the scientific worldview, depicting curiosity as the trait that truly makes us human and discovery as being inextricably linked with poetry. (Matt Prigge)

TRACING COWBOYS (7:15 p.m.; also 9:30 p.m. April 22) With only a mysterious sheaf of his vanished girlfriend’s photographs to guide him, a wanna-be British cowboy (Sacha Grunpeter) who idolizes Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard and John Ford’s The Searchers follows her trail through Mexico, hoping to solve her disappearance. Not a mystery but a fragmented mood piece that skips back and forth in time, often confusingly, Jason Wulfsohn’s ambitious, often wordless, handsomely photographed feature means to trace the hero’s development from a carbon-copy cowboy to an individual, but the scrambled structure and shallow characters blunt the revelation. The gaunt, sad-eyed Grunpeter is a striking presence; sadly, the young screenwriter-star was killed in a car accident the last day of shooting. Wulfsohn will attend. (Jim Ridley)

TRACING COWBOYS

EDEN COURT (7:45 p.m.) Shroeder (Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon) is a trailer-park mope with an ex-prom queen wife (Kimberly Paisley-Williams) and a dead-end job at the local ball park; his wife thinks he’s fooling around, when in fact he’s planning to chuck it all and move to Australia. Pitched between broad farce and morose small-town desperation, director Paul Leuer’s film often resembles filmed regional theater more than a movie, and it struggles to find a tone that will accommodate both tearful confessions and a foot race between guys in hot-dog suits. But as a friend who starts out the morning with shoplifted champagne, Mad TV’s Stephnie Weir creates an earthy, funny portrait of a hard-living good-time gal that’s the best reason to see the movie. Even better than a foot race between guys in hot-dog suits. Paisley-Williams and Leuer will attend. (Jim Ridley)

AUGUST THE FIRST (8 p.m.) It’s refreshing to see any independent film following the idiosyncratic, personal model of Charles Burnett instead of sub-Juno quirk, but it’s especially nice to see an African American filmmaker make an effort to build on Burnett’s legacy. Set during a volatile high school graduation party, Lanre Olabisi’s debut feature observes the fragmented reactions of one middle-class black family when the graduate’s father—a native Nigerian long absent from the household—comes back home for the party, for reasons no one can discern. The dialogue gets too overheated at times, and there are a handful of dramatic scenes that feel forced, but for the most part August The First is intimate and relatable, not sensationalized or cutesy. Olabisi will attend. (Noel Murray)

AUGUST THE FIRST

SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA (9:45 p.m.) Molly Hatchet’s album covers come alive in writer-director-producer-star Tony Stone’s one-of-a-kind micro-epic: a largely wordless account of two 11th century Vikings fighting for their lives in the harsh New World (actually upstate New York) after their comrades are killed. Aided by blazing red title cards and sound design that plays up the unspoiled quiet—an ax’s thwack echoes like gunfire—the movie vacillates between casual anachronism (“This fish is really killer!”) and a rugged, brooding physicality that persuades even when the no-budget seams show. Does metal appear on the soundtrack? Do Norsemen shit in the woods? (Sez the movie, graphically: yes.) Stone will attend. In Old Norse and Abenaki with subtitles. (Jim Ridley)

SEVERED WAYS: THE NORSE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

THE SWEET LADY WITH THE NASTY VOICE (10 p.m.) Heard of Wanda Jackson? Then you already know she’s the queen of rockabilly, but this doc toots that horn anyway. With a growl in her voice and a shimmy in her shake, this “Fujiyama Mama” could dish the dirt and call in debts from Joplin to Jett. But Jackson seems too sweet-natured to divulge her secrets (ahem, Elvis). Instead, filmmakers Joanne Fish and Vincent Kralyevich (and commenters from Costello to Springsteen) handle the still-touring 70-year-old Jackson with fan-club gloves, bidding for her induction into the Hall of Fame. Why isn’t she there already? Don’t wait for an answer, especially from Hall prez Terry Stewart. But the petition starts here. Fish and Kralyevich will attend. (Tracy Moore)

TRAILER PARK OF TERROR (10:15 p.m.; also 9 p.m. April 23) Move over, Herschell Gordon Lewis, there’s a new gut-ripper in town: longtime Nashville music-vid whiz Steven Goldmann, who attempts to out-splatter the master with this yucky variation on Lewis’ rebel-hell classic Two Thousand Maniacs! An accident strands a busload of troubled teens in a haunted trailer park, where the tainted haints return to dismember, devour, de-spine and barbecue the living. This nasty-ass exercise in halter-top horror is more disgusting and mean-spirited than fun—but gore aficionados will applaud Goldmann for spilling blood by the five-gallon bucket. Goldmann will attend. With Trace Adkins as Satan. (Jim Ridley)

TRAILER PARK OF TERROR

SUNDAY, 20TH

☛ ALEXANDRA (noon) Aleksandr Sokurov (Russian Ark) is considered by many to be Russia’s greatest living filmmaker. His latest, an examination of the malaise and futility that is the Chechen War, also serves as a grand statement about the human waste of war at any time and place. Elderly Alexandra (Russian opera legend Galina Vishnevskaya) slowly makes her way to the front lines in order to visit her soldier grandson and, in a sense, witness a generation squandered. Although Sokurov’s specific statements on the Chechen conflict are regrettably simplistic, and not without a touch of reflexive chauvinism, Alexandra is nevertheless a rare modern work that hovers before one’s eyes like a faded sepia postcard—a missive from a past we’re still undergoing. In Russian and Chechen with subtitles. (Michael Sicinski)

THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION (12:30 p.m.; also 1:15 p.m. April 22) Alan Swyer’s documentary portrays Americans who have adopted Hare Krishna, Zen Buddhism, yogic spirituality and other Eastern faiths, describing how their ancient mystical convictions inform their 21st century lives. It’s an old story, and while the movie doesn’t have any new revelations, it does feature an impressive array of participants, including many of the leading figures of the 1960s’ Eastern craze. Particularly moving is brief footage of Amma, the famous “hugging saint,” as she beatifically embraces supplicants for hours on end. Swyer has essentially made a feature-length commercial for Eastern religions, but he’s also captured the poignant attempts of the converted to explain their epiphanies. Swyer and Master Charles Cannon will attend. (Donna Bowman)

☛ FILM WITHOUT BOUNDARIES (12:45 p.m.) Although the films in this collection were unavailable for preview, the program includes new work by reliable names in the experimental media field such as Ariana Gerstein and Leighton Pierce, both of whom have produced exquisite work in the past. Michael Robinson’s “Light Is Waiting,” however, is a flat-out masterwork, alone worth the price of admission. Structured around reprocessed footage of ABC’s Full House, the video depicts Saget, Coolier, the Olsens and all the rest entering a kind of abstracted, crimson-and-cobalt-suffused perceptual hell—a disorienting blast for the eyes and ears. Also on the bill: Olivo Barbieri’s “Sevilla (06)” continues the Italian photographer-turned-filmmaker’s explorations of aerial landscape views with his instantly recogn