Wrapping up the Woodstock Film Festival

Operation Filmmaker: Kouross Esmaeli, Muthana Mohmed & Nina Davenport in Prague.

My sojourn at the Woodstock Film Festival is over, and it's time to reflect a little on the gazillions of frames that have passed in front of my eyeballs in the last four days. As with any other works of art, films often demand some settling-in time. The results of a few days' worth of mental processing can sometimes be surprising: a movie that left you in tears fades quickly, while another that didn't seem thrilling slowly works its way into your heart.

Now that the dust has settled, here's what has stayed with me:

• The look of arrogance, mingled with pain, on the face of Iraqi student Muthana Mohmed at the end of the documentary Operation Filmmaker. Mohmed was plucked from his bombed art school in Baghdad to work as a Hollywood movie intern, but—to the horror of his American benefactors—turned out to have zero talent and a lousy work ethic. The film, which has fascinating parallels to the larger picture of the war in Iraq, could be described as the feelbad movie of the year.

• The first twenty minutes or so of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel's third feature. Impressionistic and visceral, this film is a terrifying recreation of how it feels to wake up from a coma to find that life will never be the same. Schnabel uses a wide range of visual devices to put the viewer directly into the action, but it never feels forced or tricksy. This is virtuoso filmmaking (and the rest of the movie isn't too shabby either.)

• Brett Morgen also aims to put the viewer in the action in the vibrant, rotoscope-animated courtroom scenes in Chicago 10. Sure, he's pandering to the YouTube/MySpace crowd, but the film is bracing and exuberant, and it makes a political history lesson go down easily.

• Performances: Kristen Gonzalez and Ana Maria Colombo are perfectly matched as feisty teenager América Campo and her frosty grandmother in Cristina Kotz Cornejo's 3 Américas. The ensemble cast in Mary Stuart Masterson's debut feature The Cake Eaters is stellar, and I'll give a special call-out to Kristen Stewart for her subtle work as a neurally-damaged teen.

Of course, I only saw a tenth of the movies on the program at this year's festival, and I couldn't even get to all the movies I had tickets for. Luckily, I found local resident Alice, a sprightly 85-year-old artist and yoga practitioner, who was thrilled to take a couple of tickets off of me. My surrogate reported back that she loved James Crump's movie Black White & Gray, about Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Wagstaff. "I'd never heard of Wagstaff," she said. "Such a lovely, interesting man, and the way the movie unfolded was wonderful."

None of these movies that Alice or I saw this year won awards, however, so there were apparently lots of other great movies at the festival. The winner of the best narrative feature was Chris Eska's August Evening, about a conflicted Mexican-American family; Morgan Neville's The Cool School, about avant-garde artists in 1940s Los Angeles, took the prize for best feature-length documentary. Audience favorite awards went to Sol Tryon's dark comedy-fantasy The Living Wake and Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine's documentary about war-ravaged Uganda War/Dance. (Marlo Poras' documentary Run Granny Run was a very close second.)

So that's it for now. The festival signs have been taken down, the leaves are turning orange and gold, and Woodstock's eclectic residents are left to get on with their lives. If this were a movie, we'd see a final shot of an old Volkswagen driving past the Village green as dusk settles on the town, the storefronts twinkling and glowing in the half light. But since it's prose, I'll just say that the last four days have been an (exhausting) blast, and that the Woodstock Film Festival 2008 is sure to be well worth checking out, either as an audience member or a potential contributor, in the years to come. Small enough to feel genuinely intimate, the festival is also prestigious enough to attract a wide range of high-quality, provocative, and of course, "fiercely independent" films. Peace out, man.

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