If you were to choose a hero of last week's Nashville Film Festival, I would nominate a left-field contender who couldn't appear in person: a man named Henri Langlois. The founder of the Cinematheque Française, and a "cinephage" whose devotion to movies made him a lightning rod for the emerging film culture, Langlois was the subject of a massive 210-minute documentary that screened last week at the 36th annual festival. Even if it played to few people, it filled those few (including some local movie bookers and filmmakers) with inspiration. One person, who has the nerve to persevere in his passion, can at the very least change his community, and perhaps the world.

That idea was echoed throughout the eight-day festival, which called it a wrap last Thursday at Regal's Green Hills megaplex. There was John Peterson, the subject of the documentary-prize winner The Real Dirt on Farmer John, who turned his failing family farm into a model of organic production, despite ostracism and even fire-bombings from his neighbors. There was Memphis writer-director Craig Brewer, armed with the clout of his Sundance smash Hustle & Flow, who spent the weekend exhorting Tennessee filmmakers to fight the good fight. Above all, there was John Pierson, the indie-cinema career-maker who took early chances on struggling nobodies—who are known to you today as Spike Lee, Michael Moore and Kevin Smith.

In his documentary Reel Paradise, one of the festival's most popular entries, Pierson made his own Langlois-like mission to Fiji, spending a year bringing islanders the mixed blessing of free movies. He now lives in Austin, and at a Saturday-morning conversation with Variety critic Joe Leydon, he described how the idealistic movie nuts of the Austin Film Society had helped to turn the city into a hotbed of film production. Instead of trying to build a film community from the industry down, as Nashville has tried with little success, Austin grew one from the movie lovers up—"as good a model as any," Pierson said.

Which suggests that the movie business and movie pleasure may actually be related—and which brings us to the NaFF and its growing role as a galvanizing force in the city. Start with the numbers. After worries that sunny weekend weather had dampened this year's turnout, organizers found that the festival had drawn 14,800 people—a reported 14 percent increase (although early estimates from last year had placed attendance above 14,000). By all reckonings, it had bigger stars, better panels and a broader selection of films. Factor in other variables—including a new Thursday-to-Thursday schedule to accommodate the booking practices of host Regal Cinemas—and the festival would seem to have a mandate for its current programming mix.

In the long run, that's good news for local filmmakers. First, future NaFFs will surely extend the emphasis on music documentaries, such as this year's audience-award winner Cowboy Jack's Home Movies and the Alan Lomax tribute Lomax the Songhunter. The appeal is obvious. Not only do these films have a built-in audience, but they could give the NaFF a distinct identity in a crowded festival marketplace. They could also give a boost to local film production, inspiring more Nashville filmmakers to try their hand at music docs with a shot at Nashville Public Television or national PBS as added incentive.

But that wasn't the festival's most encouraging sign of health. The audiences were—and not just in sheer numbers. In past years, the foreign films that are often the NaFF's best selections played to sparse houses and little enthusiasm. This year, ticket-holders for the somber Hungarian drama After the Day Before were startled to find the theater full except for the two rows down front. Last year the excellent Korean film Turning Gate had a disappointing turnout. This year the Korean thriller Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, perhaps the best feature in the festival, sold out entirely. Only three empty seats were left for The World, a film by emerging Chinese master Jia Zhangke.

What's more, the post-film Q&As had a livelier tone, as did the many discussions in line before the movies. In the 20 minutes before the Saturday-night screening of The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which drew a line so long it had to be split in two, I heard people talking excitedly about everything from the Belcourt's new print of Raging Bull to the sex scenes in the new German film Head-On (due soon in Nashville). It's exactly what you'd expect to hear at a film festival—but it hasn't always been the case at ours.

I'm not suggesting that Green Hills is going to turn into the Cinematheque Française anytime soon. As a local theater booker complained, Asian films usually play here to single-digit audiences outside the festival circuit. And the festival won't thrive without crowd-pleasers like the opening-night film The Thing About My Folks, whose visiting stars, Peter Falk and Paul Reiser, made as engaging a pair offscreen as on. But NaFF artistic director Brian Gordon believes that the festival may be helping to cultivate a lively, curious film community all year round in Nashville. "There's an audience we're building here for the Belcourt and other places," he says. In turn, those places appear to be bolstering the NaFF.

Gordon says he feels "empowered" by the success of this year's festival—in part because of the warm response from guests like John Pierson, in part because visiting filmmakers seemed to have a great time. (Oren Seidler, whose pleasantly quirky doc Bruce & Me had its North American premiere here, was flocked by fans throughout the week; to make the festival sweeter, she was joined by her elusive subject, her con-man dad Bruce.) Among the few disappointments was a lackluster lineup for experimental film, one of the festival's recent strengths. The best quasi-experimental film I saw at the NaFF wasn't in the program: current Nashvillian Harmony Korine's "Above the Below," an impressionistic punk F for Fake about magician David Blaine that shared its subject's prankish sense of put-on street theater.

How to build upon this year's success? First, the festival could use some kind of organizational context beyond "This is a festival; here are some films." Other fests classify movies in categories such as "world masters" or "American visions" that indicate why they're being shown: this might help audiences understand why the same festival is programming both The World and the no-budget slasher opus The Curse of El Charro. Second, give the archival screenings some sort of theme, or invite one guest programmer to select more than one. (I nominate Korine, whose choice of Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably was a festival coup.)

Finally, make sure the festival's biggest prize, the Dreammaker Award—which went this year to the Serbian drama A Midwinter's Night's Dream—actually helps a movie reach its promised audience at a Regal megaplex in Los Angeles for Oscar qualification. If the continued success of the Nashville Film Festival tells us anything, it's that a group of dedicated people can build a community, one film at a time.