David Bowie in Reality.

The fifth annual woodstock film festival is history.  It wrapped on Sunday, October 17, after more than 120 films were shown in regional venues - at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck; in Woodstock at the Tinker Street Cinema, Town Hall, Colony Café, and Bearsville Theater; and the Catskill Mountain Foundation Theater in Hunter.

This year's festival was dedicated to the memory of Oscar-winning composer Elmer Bernstein, a founding-member of the advisory board and enthusiastic supporter of the Festival whose film scores ran the gamut from The Man with the Golden Arm to Meatballs.  The respect Bernstein had earned within the film community and his connections in Hollywood were instrumental in helping the Festival establish its reputation.  Festival founders Meira Blaustein and Laurent Rejto credit Bernstein's advice and support as an essential part of the Festival's early development.

The Elmer Bernstein Prize for Music in Film, an award unique among film festivals, which was instituted at Bernstein's suggestion and for which he was the selector at past festivals, was set aside this year due to his death in August.  Blaustein, Rejto, and the Festival Board intend that it will remain a permanent feature of future festivals.

Edgar Meyer in Obstinated, awarded Best Music Short.

This was a year filled with highlights.  There were regional and national premiers of nine feature films that ranged from the action/adventure film Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior, to the locally produced Definition of Insanity, and the eagerly-awaited new film from Dylan Kidd, p.s. More than 40 of the films in other categories - feature-length documentaries, and narrative, animated and documentary shorts - were also having their first US or area screenings.  And of course, there were the awards.

The "competitive" aspect of the Festival is comparatively low-key - as befits an event where the process of filmmaking is much more the focus than commercial success.  Although awards are given - and no doubt highly valued by their recipients - it is the idea of "honoring effort" that is embodied in these awards, not winning or losing.

One example is the Maverick Award - a special award given each year to someone seen to embody the "fiercely independent" spirit of the Woodstock Festival.  This year's recipient was ground-breaking, barrier-busting Indian-born director Mira Nair.  Her films include Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala, and the recent Vanity Fair, starring Reese Witherspoon.  Past recipients have included Woody Harrelson and Tim Robbins.

Bela Fleck.

Many of the films shown defied conventional genre categories.  For instance, Debra Granik's captivating Down to the Bone (featured in a sidebar in these pages last month) is a coherent and compelling film that doesn't fit comfortably into any of the usual pigeonholes.  Part family drama, part character study, part romance and part coming-of-age story, it manages to create a new set of narrative boundaries that avoid formula while telling an emotionally powerful story on its own terms.

As a showcase for short films - many of them developed as "calling-card" projects by young filmmakers - the festival was a treasure trove.  Short narrative and animated films, ranging from a couple of minutes in length to more than a quarter of an hour, showed a wealth of imagination and innovation.  Subject matter ranged from the trivial and amusing to the profound and disturbing.

The relatively simple availability of highly-professional looking computer generated imagery (CGI) effects through personal computers and editing software was very much in evidence - sometimes too much so - but, as William Blake remarked "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."  One of the great features of a festival like Woodstock, with a savvy audience of film-buffs and filmmakers, is the opportunity to push the envelope - to take real chances, and even make the mistakes that can be critical, creative learning experiences, in a relaxed and supportive atmosphere.

Mik Horowitz & Gilles Malkine emceed the Maverick Awards Ceremony.

That's one of the reasons so many filmmakers and industry professionals are attracted to the event.  The informality and sense of collegiality was obvious across the festival.  Participants socialized in the evenings at a series of well-planned (and deliciously catered!) events at some of the region's finest gathering places, including New World Home Cooking, Cafe S., The Colony Café, and Legends, all in the Woodstock area, and Gigi Trattoria and Phoenix Rising in Rhinebeck.

After hours conversations ranged from serious considerations of technical aspects of filmmaking and the ethical and moral boundaries (and definition) of documentary filmmaking in light of films like Fahrenheit 9/11, to insider industry dish.  Established professionals were generous with their hard-earned knowledge and younger filmmakers and students sought to learn and establish networking contacts in the relaxed surroundings.

There were Q&A sessions with directors, writers, cast, and crew after many of the screenings that often continued out onto the sidewalks as impromptu seminars.  There were panels on acting, writing, making independent films, and marketing that brought together industry professionals, those trying to get into the business, and interested members of the general public to learn more about all the com-plicated aspects of getting a film made.

Screenwriter/Producer James Schamus of Focus Features (formerly Good Machine) and Peter Bowen of Filmmaker magazine and the Sundance Channel discussed the directions film-marketing has taken in recent years, and the strategies distribution companies adopt to reduce risk and get the most play out of any film.

Outside the Fisher Center at Bard on opening night.

Their professional description of the incredibly tight marketing focus - separating the potential audience into "four quadrants" by age range and - gender and then identifying which "quadrant" is the target audience and - creating a marketing strategy tailored to sell the particular film to them - was revealing.  The story of how films are tracked, both in pre-release screenings and after the film has opened, to fine tune marketing and to learn lessons for future films could easily make a subject for a fascinating documentary.

The discussion ranged from the practical - how distribution companies get their films seen and make the profits they need in order to continue to function - to the philosophical - how marketing strategies might drive acquisition policy and how the content of films can be influenced by what is perceived as "marketable."

Schamus - who is also an Associate Professor at Columbia University - and Bowen responded graciously and fully, with first-hand knowledge as well as theoretical insight, to audience questions that continued until the venue had to be cleared for the next screening.  The rare chance to ask tough questions of people who are actual decision makers in the industry in such an informal and congenial setting was one that the aspiring filmmakers in the audience clearly relished.

Amazing Grace filmmakers Nyla Adams and Laurie Trombley.

At a discussion of Down to the Bone sponsored by New York Women in Film and Television, an enthusiastic audience (almost all of whom had seen the film), appreciated the frank and free-wheeling discussion of the film's evolution and the many practical, technical, dramatic, and personal questions that had to be addressed in bringing it to the screen.

The participants were filmmaker Debra Granik and her location manager, locally based Michelle Baker, as well as the couple, Corrine Stralka and Richard Lieske, on whose lives the fictionalized events of the film are based (one of whom - Lieske - is credited as co-screenwriter, and both of whom advised and collaborated on the finished script).  Their conversation gave a very clear picture of the exigencies of producing a low-budget independent feature that was clearly both cautionary and inspiring to many in the audience.

There was a lot of enthusiasm for the film which, in spite of winning prestigious awards for directing and acting at the 2004 Sundance Festival, has still not found a distributor.  Interested audience members offered suggestions and their own expertise to the filmmakers in trying to find outlets for wider exposure.  This kind of give-and-take across the conventional divide between "audience" and "filmmakers" is a hallmark feature of the Woodstock festival, one I saw repeated in many variations over the four days of screenings.

A still from Amazing Grace.

But the greatest treat of any film festival is the movies.  If you have never seen three or more feature films a day for a period of several days, you can't really know what it is like.  Although there is, of course, some tendency of the films to blur together - especially in the first four or five screenings - there is also an effect of amplification and illumination by virtue of the striking contrasts between subject matter, technical approach and style.

When you are exposed to such a variety of film all of which "works" to varying degrees - across such stylistic, thematic and technical lines - you begin to be able to see the process of filmmaking in a new way.  You begin to see what happens in a film as a series of conscious choices made by the  directors, actors, editors,  cinematographers, set-designers, and even locations scouts.  Seeing such a variety of choices made by filmmakers virtually "side-by-side" raises awareness of how the complex and subtle interaction of the elements of a film - which will resonate differently form viewer to viewer - creates the experience each of us remembers when we leave the theater.

The very effective The Machinist, for instance, centers on a riveting performance from a skeletal and sleep-deprived Christian Bale.  But highly stylized camera-work that recalls elements of both the German Expressionists and the horror genre (which has borrowed and taken creative inspiration from the Expressionists as well) is essential in creating the texture and atmosphere of the film that supports Bale's characterization.

Musician Tony Levin at the Maverick Awards Ceremony.

The much more conventional "picture-framing" camera work of Dear Frankie, from England's Shona Auerbach, creates quite a different mood of intimacy and emotional "realism" for her film.  Yet elements including  graceful tracking shots and hand-held camera work that introduces an element of immediacy and risk provide a counterpoint that enhances the actual dramatic content.

That the point of view from which we observe events  -  that of a near participant, closely affected by the topography of the terrain and literally "in the face" of the characters, or alternatively, that of an almost omniscient observer, watching from a distance, following the action with smooth, sweeping movements that suggest weightlessness and flight - is an essential part of our experience of a film becomes strikingly clear when we see these choices made in contrasting ways in various films and feel their effects on us first hand.

Such experiences and insights are the reason that people are so deeply touched by film, and that people who love film go to festivals like Woodstock to engage themselves with the process more intensely and completely, and on many more levels, than they can in ordinary weekly attendance at theaters.

A relatively small, intimate festival like Woodstock that can attract first-rate talent and productions, without attracting all the commercial hoopla that often accompanies - and in many cases seems to have overwhelmed - more "established" events, is a gift to film-lovers.  A place where the relatively inexperienced but inspired and talented risk-taker and the accomplished and seasoned, yet somehow still "aspiring" professional can come together, present their work, communicate freely, and perhaps even learn from one another, seems to be another way of describing Meira Blaustein and Laurent Rejto's "film festival created by filmmakers."  But above all, the Woodstock Film Festival is four days of bliss for those who have both affection for and curiosity about the art and entertainment of movies.