The roof is back on the Sequoia Theater where it belongs; the film festival again centers in Mill Valley where it belongs; the Opening Night party has returned to the square where it belongs—and, for the festival brain trust, that feeling of belonging has never been more appreciated.

“We’re very grateful to be back here again,” Program Director Zoe Elton says, “because as much as the festival is about the world, it’s about this village.”

This village, host to this high-energy cinematic Oktoberfest for the 28th time, will be red-carpeting actors Donald Sutherland and Jeff Daniels and directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Michael Powell in tributes. Powell’s widow, Thelma Schoonmaker, who won Academy Awards for editing The Aviator and Raging Bull, will be on hand to discuss her husband’s work, which includes The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus.

Daniels, who will be here with a closing night film The Squid and the Whale, Jeunet, known especially for Amélie and City of Lost Children, and Sutherland, who ushers in the umpteenth version of Pride and Prejudice and needs no introduction himself, will engage audiences during onstage interviews following retrospectives of their careers. Actress Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives fame, too young for a tribute we guess, is to be honored similarly in what the fest folks call a spotlight. She may raise a few eyebrows with her performance in Transamerica (Oct. 9, 3pm), in which she plays a father about to have a sex change operation.

The Opening Night hoopla Oct. 6 offers a pair of movies out of a Hollywood big top, the Weinstein Company, the boys who started Miramax and left recently to regain autonomy from Disney. One screen fires up Stephen Frears’s Mrs. Henderson Presents, with Judi Dench playing a widow who creates a theater company of questionable moral values during World War II. Based on a true story, the film also features Bob Hoskins and Christopher Guest.

The opening kickoff’s twin, Richard Shephard’s The Matador starring Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear, unspools with Brosnan, expected to be at the festival with his usual dash, portraying an egocentric assassin addicted to alcohol and sex. MVFF Executive Director Mark Fishkin calls the movie “a wild ride.”

Last year, when the ceiling collapsed at the Sequoia—making this village a movie orphan—and venues were spread even into the city, Fishkin tried to reassure festivalgoers that Mill Valley was “a state of mind.” Realtors may not agree—and audiences felt it was one thing to see a movie, and quite another to see one in this little cinema city during heady festival evenings. But Elton says, “Insofar as a state of mind, I think it’s not just where we are now, but where we’ve come from. In the early days, the festival established its niche. It had and has a distinctive quality to it—a bit off center, an artistic sensibility, a beautiful location in the redwoods, people had sort of found Nirvana. And with all that, it manages to embrace the world, geographically, socially and politically.”

• • • •

OOH, POLITICALLY. MENTION politics to me on any given evening during the last several years of the Bush administration and I can usually save myself a bottle of valerian caps—having discovered only recently that sleeping can be a great escape. But with more than 150 movies and videos from 55 countries, including a few from your favorite vacation spots such as Madagascar, Liberia, Kyrgyzstan and Iraq, the festival has sucked up the most relevant slate of films about political issues that I’ve seen outside the National Archives. These, in fact, kept me up at night.

Return to the Land of Wonders (Oct. 7, 7pm and Oct. 9, 12:15pm) will let you know, bluntly, how Iraqi citizens feel about the occupation and what has been going on in their country since the U.S. invasion. It was shot and edited by an Iraqi-born woman, Maysoon Pachachi, who returned from exile to her homeland with her father, the man Bush picked to become head of state, but who failed to gain popular support and hurriedly left the country.

How the mess in Iraq disrupts a family in Oakland and forces a single mom in the National Guard into active duty is the dilemma in One Weekend a Month (Oct. 10, 5pm and Oct. 11, 5pm), a Sundance award-winner in short dramatic filmmaking. Filmmaker Eric Escobar, whose father is a Vietnam vet recently diagnosed with a terminal illness from Agent Orange, says, “More than 24,000 single mothers are currently on active duty and 40 percent of the troops in Iraq are [National] Guard or [Army] Reserve.” Reportedly, a DVD of Escobar’s work was sent to a guardswoman in Iraq who showed it to her active duty colleagues in Tikrit.

Another entry sure to induce a fair amount of squirming is Paradise Now (Oct. 15, 7pm and Oct. 16, 6:45pm), a dramatic feature about the last 24 hours of two Palestinians who volunteer as suicide bombers. Dutch-Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad shot the film during actual violence in the West Bank town of Nablus, establishing a Palestinian point of view but countering it through one of his main characters, who is vehemently opposed to bombings and martyrdom. Curiously, Israel backed the film with France, Germany and the Netherlands.

Chile chips in with The Last Moon (Oct. 9, 8:30pm and Oct. 11, 9:30pm), another West Bank story of an Argentine Jew befriending a Palestinian Orthodox Christian and how their relationship is tested in the gathering storm that becomes World War I.

After seeing Swedish director Stefan Jarl’s riveting The Girl from Auschwitz (Oct. 8, 3pm) about journalist/activist Cordelia Edvardson, who really did survive the concentration camps, you’ll probably need a week to recover from some of the truly horrifying footage. But don’t miss this life story of a woman who has devoted herself to conveying a more truthful, more complex examination of injustices on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

A stunning trio of films, Poumy, Fateless and Sophie Scholl, spin nerve-wracking tales from World War II and turn them into memorable experiences. On the same bill as Auschwitz, San Francisco filmmaker Sam Ball’s 30-minute Poumy introduces us to 92-year-old Andree “Poumy” Moreuil, one of the “ordinary” heroines in France who escaped the Nazis, saved her children and joined the French Resistance. “The story of Poumy reflects my family’s story,” Ball says. “That’s one of the reasons I was drawn to it. My mother was born in Paris in 1941 and was saved by my grandmother, whose life has parallels with Poumy’s. This was a way for me to honor the heroics of those whose stories have largely been ignored.”

Nobel laureate Imre Kertész’s novel about his own survival as a teenager in Nazi concentration camps forms the backbone of Fateless (Oct. 9, 5:45pm and Oct. 10, 8:15pm), a drama by Hungarian cinematographer-turned-director Lajos Koltai that plunges into the core of human emotion and is being whispered in some circles as a masterpiece.

Another profile in courage and one exploring heroics on the other side of the barbed wire comes from German director Marc Rothemud’s Sophie Scholl: The Last Days (Oct. 7, 6:30pm), about a Munich University student who formed an underground anti-Hitler group called the White Rose. The screenplay is based on recently released transcripts of interrogations, including those with a Gestapo agent and a trial judge. Julia Jentsch, in the title role, won a Best Actress Award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

Set in the current climate in the Middle East, Ushpizin (Oct. 15, 8:30pm and Oct. 16, 5:15pm) marks the first collaborative creative effort between the religious and secular communities in Israel. When a couple is thrown together with two escaped prisoners, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man and his wife believe God is testing them. This shades-of-Job plot stars the one-time popular Israeli actor Shuli Rand, who years ago gave up his career to follow ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

And finally, in war-torn Ethiopia in the mid-’80s, a non-Jewish mother disguises her young son as a Jew (now there’s a switch) so he’ll be airlifted to Israel in director Radu Mihaileanu’s Live and Become (Oct. 11, 6:30pm). In his new home, the boy struggles to cope with his identity and bewildering racism.

Pretty weighty stuff. But, as if to prove there is always room for levity, even with subjects as sobering as the Middle East or the raging fires of global warfare, the festival has slated The Lady from Sockholm (Oct. 8, 4:15pm and Oct. 15, 12pm), undoubtedly the first noir tale of a bunch of down-and-out sock puppets battling Knitler’s forces during Wool War II. Can you spot Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray—or at least their socks—in this yarn?

• • • •

AS THE MVFF ages (and as domestic festivals go, this one is “absolutely a senior citizen,” Fishkin says), it shows no signs of slowing down or needing high doses of joint fuel. Nevertheless, if we didn’t know better, we might think a chunk of this season’s lineup was programmed by AARP, the United Seniors Association and the Gray Panthers. There are more films showcasing what Golden Agers can do with their lives than the studios have produced since the days when “by cracky!” was acceptable dialogue. The loud-and-clear message is age doesn’t matter unless you’re a cheese.

There is cinema celebrating senior dancers, senior actors, senior mermaids (!), senior activists, a senior art collector, a senior clothing designer, a senior jazz singer, a senior judge. Maybe even a high school senior.

Heather MacDonald’s Toots Crackin’ Productions documentary Been Rich All My Life (Oct. 11, 7:15pm and Oct. 12, 9:15pm) proves you’re never too old to kick up your heels, as she tap-dances us through the heyday of the original 1930s Apollo Theater Rockettes to their time-defying present. Ranging in age from 84 to 96, the Silver Belles—as they now call themselves—are still at it, bonded by their passion, their friendship, their tireless energy and their lust for life. And you thought you were doing well with that walk around the block.

For every Clarence Thomas in our courts, let’s hope there is at least one Thelton Henderson. Recruited by Robert F. Kennedy to be the first black lawyer for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, the San Francisco-based federal judge, now 71, has consistently made rulings that are protective of the rights of the disenfranchised and that usually have conservatives scampering for the Maalox—among them deciding Prop 209 (ending affirmative action) was unconstitutional. Producer/director Abby Ginzberg, a former attorney, calls Henderson an “inspirational” figure and says she was driven to make the film because “if I did not tell it, it would not get told.” The fascinating Soul of Justice (Oct. 9, 2:45pm and Oct. 10, 7pm) explores, in her words, “the conflicts and contradictions Judge Henderson faced as an educated black man, who…has been both honored and vilified for remaining true to his beliefs.”

Another notable life destined to drift into anonymity were it not for the passion of an admirer was that of Irene Williams, a South Beach Miami octogenarian with a flair for designing flamboyant clothing and everyday wisdoms. The admirer, in this case, San Francisco’s Eric Smith, struck up a long friendship and was moved to create a 23-minute first film as a memorial to a feisty, 4-foot-tall Boston transplant. Irene Williams: Queen of Lincoln Road screens Oct. 8 at 2:45pm in a program titled Tender Gender Benders.

In the Different Drummers collection on the following day at 5:30pm, catch Leah Wolchok’s 16-minute City of Mermaids and Nancy Kelly’s 29-minute Smitten for a glimpse of what one can accomplish without Geritol. Mermaids takes us to Weekiwachi Springs, Florida (population 9), for the story of an aging roadside attraction once visited by Elvis but now being snuffed out of existence by Disney World. Despite the best efforts of three generations of mermaids (including one 74-year-old still feverishly flapping through a program called “Tails of Yesteryear”), the enterprise is on its last, uh, fins. “As ridiculous as it sounds, I fell in love with the magic of the place,” says the San Francisco filmmaker. “It’s beautiful and bizarre. [The film is] both quirky and poignant with kitschy elements like animation and ’50s newsreels, combined with moments of insight about why America has become obsessed with the plastic land of Disney.”

Meanwhile, Kelly’s Smitten profiles super-senior Rene di Rosa, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, a former Napa Valley vintner and a longtime art collector of more than 2,000 works, many of them by Northern California artists. The Greenbrae director, whose feature Thousand Pieces of Gold played at the fest in 1990, says the 85-year-old di Rosa’s passion is fueled “neither by interior decorating nor increasing social status, but by the pure joy of discovery…He is a very unique person, one of a kind, really.”

If you like your poetry laced with politics and what ex-flower child doesn’t, don’t miss feature-length biopics about black entertainers/activists Beah Richards and Oscar Brown Jr. In Beah: A Black Woman Speaks (Oct. 15, 12:30pm and Oct. 16, 5:15pm), LisaGay Hamilton crafts an in-your-face portrait of the late actress/activist whose fiery poetry riled J. Edgar Hoover enough to kick off an FBI probe. (Well, was there a black person who didn’t rile J. Edgar Hoover?) But this trip through an amazing woman’s personal history says a lot about race relations in this country and is laced with candid talk, philosophy and food-for-thought. Filmed during the last year of Richards’s life, actress/director Hamilton’s documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2003 AFI Film Festival.

In Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress (Oct. 9, 5pm and Oct. 10, 9pm) you’ll meet Brown Jr., another late great senior with staying power and a soul full of energy, music, conviction and heroics. Best chance to get to know the singer/poet/actor/activist, who died earlier this year.

While we’re on the subject of, ahem, maturity, let us not overlook Shopgirl and Forty Shades of Blue, two tales of older guys hooking up with their dream nymphets. As in most stories of this ilk, there is always a younger, handsomer man with less polish and less seductive cash in the mix. So what do you root for—love, money or the love of money? Steve Martin adapted his own novella and stars as the older gentleman opposite Claire Danes as the target of his desires. Jason Schwartzman is her peer without a penny in his pocket. Shopgirl screens Oct. 10 at 7pm.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, Forty Shades of Blue (Oct. 7, 9:30pm) unveils a tortured love triangle involving a gray-haired, successful music producer played by Rip Torn, a young Russian immigrant woman and the music producer’s son. There are plenty of shots of Memphis and a healthy lacing of R&B to create the visual and auditory foreshadowing of an inevitable conclusion. Directed by Ira Sachs.

• • • •

FOR THE YOUNG, the young at heart, the moppet and the moppet in you, forget not the Children’s FilmFest, highlighting a new print of Hoppity Goes to Town (Oct. 9, 11:30am), the classic cartoon feature from the animation studio of Dave and Max Fleischer, the artists who gave birth to Popeye and Betty Boop. Then check out San Francisco computer magician Derek Flood’s Emelia, nine minutes of animation innovation about a 5-year-old goth girl with a pet bat and a crying need. (Oct. 15 at 4:15pm on A Toon for the Misbegotten smorgasbord of animated shorts.)

As has become a festival trademark, there are even works by kids—and remember, Lucas and Spielberg started as kids, too—including The Weight of Justice by four high schoolers exploring the paradoxes in our national system of justice; and two entries from the San Francisco Art & Film Workshop for teenagers: Samantha Yu’s The Winner based on a D.H. Lawrence work, and Postcards from Paris (collectively shown Oct. 15, 11am) in which six teenage directors, three camera people, 40 actors and 10 writers re-created bohemian Paris. Ten writers? Hmm, just like they do in Hollywood.

While the massive moviemaking machines in Tinseltown may have turned their steel backs on Northern California for location shooting in recent years, the locals are making the most of what’s here.

In what may seem like a horror film to many Marinites, a smug, greedy young developer paves over parts of the Headlands to build multimillion-dollar mini-mansions for the pig rich in Jonathan Parker’s The Californians (Oct. 8, 2pm and Oct. 12, 6pm). Asked what prompted him to take on the project, the San Rafael filmmaker says, “I was inspired by Henry James’s character Olive in The Bostonians and how much she resembled a Marin Whole Foods customer.” Noah Wyle, Cloris Leachman and Keith Carradine head the cast in a production shot entirely in county.

On the other side of the bay, you’ll find another of the closing night films, Bee Season (Oct. 16, 5pm and 7:45pm), shot in Oakland with Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche. But the scene-grabber here is grade-schooler Flora Cross as their 9-year-old whiz kid whose remarkable gift for spelling lands her in several high-profile contests while simultaneously fracturing the delicate foundation of her family. Adapted from a Myla Goldberg novel by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, who wrote the luminous Running on Empty and is one of the best writers of film today, the narrative is more than a little reminiscent of the spellbinding 2002 documentary Spellbound, though its ability to seduce may have you counting the lumps in your throat.

Just north of Oakland, director Bobby Roth takes us back to the wonderful world of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, circa 1968, for a thoroughly engrossing story about a naive Cal freshman who gets his education the hard way. (Seems like just the other day, doesn’t it?) Roth cast his son Nick in the lead in Berkeley (Oct. 8, 6:45pm and Oct. 11, 6:15pm), supported by two actors who ought to know that era well, Henry Winkler and Bonnie Bedelia.

Berkeley director Rob Nilsson, who must hold some sort of record for successive features in the festival, again takes to the streets in San Francisco’s Tenderloin with his improvisational style, called direct action cinema, to craft a hard-edged drama about the fragile friendships and desperate hopes of women working the sex trade in order to survive. Need screens Oct. 13 at 7:15pm and Oct. 14 at 9:30pm.

Ever wonder why Los Angeles was able to repair its earthquake damage in one year while the Bay Area, home of the world’s most beautiful bridges and most dangerous fault lines, took more than a decade-and-a-half figuring out what to do with the new east span of the Bay Bridge? Brisbane filmmaker David L. Brown points accusatory fingers in the right places in explaining, with the help of professional comedians, who caused the absurd delays and the countless wasted billions. Check out The Bridge So Far: A Suspense Story (Oct. 8, 12pm), a sometimes laughable, sometimes brutally painful examination of political incompetence.

From another section of the city comes Romantico (Oct. 16, 2:45pm), a documentary exploring the lives and music of the Mission District’s mariachis and one, in particular, who dreams of supporting his family in Mexico but who himself is struggling to make a go of it. His music provides a sharp contrast to the melancholy man beneath the colorful clothes.

San Francisco documentary director Stephen Olsson was also a long way from home when he shot the spiritually engaging Sound of the Soul: The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music in Morocco, a country where Muslims, Jews and Christians live in peace. “The festival is, in many ways, the answer to narrow and divisive religious interpretations,” he says. “Musically and experientially, I tried to go into the depths of the mystical experience, the ecstasy which lies at the heart of this kind of devotional music, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish…because to me, all these songs and traditions are all together making one sound, and that is the universal and eternal sound of the soul.” Shows Oct. 9 at 5:45pm and Oct. 13 at 7pm.

On a more earthly and decidedly less mystical definition of soul, the musical wing of the film fest once again offers its signature Hi De Ho Show (Oct. 8, 10pm). For the uninitiated, this is a graduate degree in musicology stuffed into 90 minutes with the Wizard of All Notes, John Goddard. You’ll time-travel through Goddard’s personal video archives back to the bobby sox era and later zero in on the madness of the psychedelic ’60s. Just like that, 45 years younger. It’s an evening you won’t find anywhere else—and may never want to return from.

If we do get you back, however, you’ll have the opportunity to fashion the life and half-life of numerous filmmakers, each on a quest for a bright future and maybe even fame and fortune, as the Mill Valley Film Festival initiates its first Audience Awards. Where else can you get a shot at imitating Ebert & Roeper? “This is a great way for us to get a pulse on the audience,” programmer Elton says. “This is not a competition per se, but it does give us a little bit more sense of where people’s hearts go and what our audience is like.”

Which of these selections will launch the careers of tomorrow’s Jean-Pierre Jeunets or Donald Sutherlands? You may end up with a better idea than the rest of us. And while it may be impossible to see everything, MVFF’s Fishkin says, “We applaud all those who try.”