Filmmakers

Anula Shetty was desperate for a white dress. She devised a plan. To be a swan in the school play, you needed a white dress. Basically, that was the only requirement. The teacher who was casting the play asked which little girls in the class owned a white dress. Anula put up her hand. Then she went home to her mother, and told her that she had been picked to play a swan in the school play, and that she would have to go out and purchase a white dress. "Finally my mom and my teacher met," Shetty recounts in the movie What Are Little Girls Made Of?

The 18th annual PhilaFilm festival begins Wednesday, featuring a tribute to Hispanic film and video artists, as well as a selection of independent cinema from around the globe. The tribute begins Wednesday with Eduardo Sanchez's "Gabriel's Dream," the story of a working-class revolt against an inflexible factory boss, and closes Saturday with this year's gold medal feature winner, "Sicario: Assassin for Hire" from Colombian director Jose Novoa. In between is an eclectic blend of movies, documentaries and dramas both domestic and foreign.

Tran is a tough kid who belongs to a Cambodian gang in Philadelphia. Neang is a beautiful dancer who recently immigrated from Cambodia. Boy meets girl, and there's trouble. She is repelled by him. She is attracted to him. She tries to help him. He tries to get away from the gang but can't do it. There's a big fight. Then. . . . I don't want to spoil things by telling you the end of Khmer Street, the 27-minute video starring Meth Moeun as Tran and Linda Vong as Neang. Khmer Street is one of the dozen videos that will be screened in the weeklong (mostly free)

Ron Rollet wants to take filmgoers to the next level. Why not catch a movie and linger afterward to chat with the filmmakers and actors? What can beat firsthand answers to burning questions about pithy plots? Rollet, the founder and director of the Cape May New Jersey State Film Festival, is bringing audiences and New Jersey filmmakers together this weekend in the Shore resort. "We want to support New Jersey filmmakers and independent films shot in New Jersey," said Rollet, a screenwriter and former film professor.

Hollywood doesn't know where to turn. Sex, sin and violence used to be sure-fire box office. But "Jade" went unscrutinized, "Strange Days" made only the mildest pop, and fans of "The Scarlet Letter" had the good sense to go to the library. All three films had seemed assured of passable opening weekends before word-of-mouth took its toll. Meanwhile, "Seven" continues to soar, with its ultimate take expected to exceed Brad Pitt's star-making "Legends of the Fall. " The grim crime drama's word-of-mouth dictates: "Even if you don't like it, you gotta see it!"

One of the reasons most filmmakers direct movies rather than write novels is that film, not English, is their first language. Thus a documentary in which gifted filmmakers yak about movies is an unpromising prospect. And although Hollywood Mavericks includes clips from films by Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, John Cassavetes, Francis Coppola, Sam Fuller and Martin Scorsese, there is something wrong about a movie that allows directors' talk to take precedence over action. It's like inviting heavyweights to participate in a thumb-wrestle.

What may be the shortest coup in modern history took place in Venezuela almost two years ago, on the night of April 11, 2002, and a remarkable documentary called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised puts you in the middle of it. Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain had no idea, when they arrived in Venezuela in the fall of 2000, that they would be making anything except a documentary profiling the new popularly elected president, Hugo...

Call it a contemporary Vietnamese drama with political overtones. A prostitute in Hue falls in love with a gallant Viet Cong revolutionary. Later, corrupted by power and position as a high-ranking communist official, he rejects her to protect himself. But she finds happiness - with a soldier from the discredited Saigon regime. The film is called The Girl on the River, and director Dang Nhat Ninh recalls how "the trouble started" almost as soon as it was first shown to the public two years ago. "A lot of people got indignant," Ninh recalled in a recent interview.

He had just finished a heavily publicized goodwill flight from Mexico City to Washington, D.C., where the president congratulated him at a White House luncheon. He was honored at countless celebrations, warmly received by the mayor of New York, and escorted by friend Charles Lindbergh. Barely 22, Capt. Emilio Carranza was a hero in his native Mexico, one of the world's great pioneer aviators. He probably never imagined he'd also be a movie star 78 years later - after he died in New Jersey's Pinelands while flying back to Mexico.

Think of the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France as the Olympics for artisans whose crafts do not normally lend themselves to cutthroat competition. One such area is pastry chefs, and every four years, the best and brightest French concocters of confections gather in Lyon for a to-the-teeth battle for sweet supremacy. Veteran documentarians D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus - the team behind the Oscar-nominated "The War Room" (1993) - focus their lens on this aspect of the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France in their new doc "The King of Pastry.

PHILADELPHIA NATIVE Rel Dowdell had a fairy-tale baptism in the world of independent film. While at film school at Boston University, Dowdell pitched his idea for a student short film to Esther Rolle, expanded that to a feature called "Train Ride," released it on DVD and saw it heralded as one of the top 10 titles of the year for 2000. That's the good news. The bad news: Dowdell had exhausted his lifetime supply of good news. He was about to discover firsthand just how hard it is to make and distribute a truly independent movie.

THE FIRST NIGHT Mike Dennis went to the Black Lily performing-arts series at the Five Spot, he saw a 13-year-old girl take the stage, start her set with a snippet of a gospel song and, with the crowd behind her, proceed to blow the roof off the now-defunct Old City club. Her name was Jazmine Sullivan, and she would later have a No. 1 hit with "Need U Bad. " Dennis and his partner, Daryl Debrest, continued to chronicle Black Lily, a weekly performance series that ran from 2000 to 2005 and was geared toward letting women have the mic. Black Lily flourished at a time when the music industry turned its eye to Philly to find the next big thing in neo-soul, a genre that gave rise to Jill Scott, Lady Alma and Jaguar Wright.

Bradford Young, artist among filmmakers, is a cinematographer most comfortable behind the camera. But the soft-spoken 34-year-old is enjoying his moment in front. For two consecutive years, indie movies that he has lensed have won prizes at the Sundance Film Festival, including one for his work on the coming-of-age and coming-out drama Pariah. His stunning use of light has won him international admirers, including Nigerian director Andrew Dosunmu, with whom he worked on the African-in-Manhattan nocturne Restless City, which opens Friday.

RALEIGH, N.C. — Fans of The Hunger Games are turning up in North Carolina, seeking out places where the movie was shot, from old-growth forests to an abandoned mill town. And the tourism industry is prepared to cash in on them, with everything from hotel packages and zipline tours to reenactments of scenes from the film and lessons in survival skills. The movie, which led the box office for its first four weeks and had already earned more than a half-billion dollars worldwide, is based on a best-selling book about a post-apocalyptic world where teenagers compete to the death in fighting games.

If The Lady is any indication, Luc Besson, the Paris-born filmmaker behind such testosterone-fueled thrillers as Taken, Transporter 2 , and The Fifth Element, is having a tough time getting in touch with his feminine side. Yes, there was his recent script for Colombiana, but at least as portrayed by Zoe Saldana, that was one tough chick. The Lady, on the other hand, required both elegance and eloquence in telling the story of Burmese pro-democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, whose efforts earned her a Nobel Prize.

Pierre Schoendoerffer, 83, an Oscar-winning French filmmaker who was held prisoner in Indochina and chronicled the pain of war on screen and on the page, has died. The French military health service confirmed that he died Wednesday. "France will miss him," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement that praised the "legendary filmmaker and novelist" for risking his life for France and "helping us better understand our collective history. " Born in central France on May 5, 1928, Mr. Schoendoerffer was a cameraman in the French army in the 1950s and volunteered to be parachuted into the besieged fortress of Dien Bien Phu, where the decisive battle of the French war in Indochina was fought.

TEMPLE GRADS and local-boys-make-good Tim Wareheim and Eric Heidecker are masters of the absurdist comedy in short bursts. Their contributions to Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim," and FunnyOrDie.com have won them a small but disturbed following. In "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie," they try stretching their brand to feature length, starring as numbskull versions of themselves in a story of two would-be filmmakers who blow a large sum of studio money on a failed movie, then go into hiding at a rundown shopping mall, hired out as managers.

THE TOYNBEE tiles are embedded within the very fabric of Philadelphia. Found in seemingly random spots throughout the city, the license-plate-size tiles are etched with a cryptic message: "TOYNBEE IDEAS IN KUbrick's 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER. " The tiles also have been found up and down the East Coast and even in Chile and Argentina. Many have investigated the mystery behind the tiles. Who placed them? What do they mean? But until the documentary "Resurrect Dead," the only person who knew the answers to those questions was the one placing the tiles.

Zalman King, 70, who became known for his erotic work after writing and producing his breakthrough film 91/2 Weeks , died Friday morning at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a six-year battle with cancer, said his son-in-law Allison Burnett. Born Zalman King Lefkovitz in 1941, Mr. King began his career as an actor in the 1960s. He and his wife, Patricia Louisianna Knop, collaborated on the screenplay for 91/2 Weeks (1986), which became a cult hit starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.

PARK CITY, Utah - Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, who met as Temple film students in the mid-1990s, last week prepared for the world premiere of their first feature, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, at the Sundance Film Festival. But just before Sundance began, terrible news broke: They'd been Rango 'ed. "Sundance gang," Heidecker posted on his Twitter feed, "B$M [Billion Dollar Movie] got Rango 'd (large portions of our movie replaced with Rango outtakes)