It is an utter impossibility to see all of the hundreds of films presented in the eleven days (one less than usual) of this year’s Montreal World Film Festival. So one must approach the daunting schedule, which offers as many as 13 different films at a given moment, with a plan. The most obvious tactic, as well as the most consistently rewarding, is to see as many of the films in the official competition as possible. The programmers who select the eligible films do a commendable job of presenting the cream of the crop from a broad range of countries: if you only see these twenty films, you’ll have got the festival in a nutshell.

Along with La Ciudad de los Prodigios (The City of Marvels), The Minus Man, and The Bridge, which I discussed last week, I was especially impressed by two other films in competition. Fuori dal Mondo (Not of this World), from Italy, is a contemplative character piece that reminded me, surprisingly, of some of the better American films of the mid-1970s. Caterina, novitiate who is about to take her vows finds an abandoned infant, wrapped in a sweater, during a walk in the park. She takes the baby to the proper authorities, but can’t shake the incident from her mind. Wanting to find the mother, she goes to the dry-cleaner whose tag is on the sweater. There she meets Ernesto, the store’s middle-aged proprietor, a man whose outlook on where life has taken him somewhat mirrors her own. Not much happens on a plot level, but writer-director Giuseppe Piccioni (aided greatly by composer Ludovico Einaudo) has crafted a subtle but richly affecting look at people emerging from the cocoons they have built for themselves. Leaving this film, I found myself looking at strangers on the street in a different way, unable (at least for awhile) to shut them out of my mind.

The Color of Paradise (also known as The Color of Heaven or The Color of God) is the latest in a line of films from Iran that have established that country’s national cinema as perhaps the most vital of the 1990s. Like his peers Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami, writer-director Majid Majidi (whose Oscar-nominated The Children of Heaven has just been released to video) uses amateur performers to tell a gentle story in which the beautiful Iranian countryside figures prominently. An eight-year-old blind boy is retrieved from his school in Tehran by his country father, a widower who considers the boy an additional curse in his already hard life. The lessons offered in The Color of Paradise may be obvious, but the sheer cinematic vision with which they are offered make them unforgettable. Like the best of the other Iranian films, this could be stripped of its dialogue and still succeed as a compelling viewing experience.

Among the other competing films I saw: Misery Harbour is a Scandinavian-Canadian co-production from director Nils Gap (The Pathfinder). It is told in the form of a novel-in-progress written by its protagonist, who as a young man escaped his futureless town in Denmark for Nova Scotia, only to find himself pursued by the personification of his bad luck. It’s a handsomely mounted film that seems to be missing a third act, with a climax that is anything but. The same could be said for Dreaming of Joseph Lees, a Thomas Hardy-esque tale set in rural England of the 1950s. A young woman is torn between her cousin, whom she has loved from afar since she was a girl, and a local youth whose love she carelessly encourages. Already picked up for American distribution by Fox Searchlight, it’s an above-average example of the “Masterpiece Theater” school of movies up until a perfunctory ending that leaves the story unresolved.

Ma Petite Entreprise (My Little Business), a French comedy about the beleaguered owner of a carpentry shop who is forced to mount a complicated caper to falsify his insurance records, is likable enough but very slight, hardly the sort of film you’d expect to find in competition. Likewise the German film The Volcano, a wholly predictable melodrama about artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazis, was probably shown for all the wrong reasons. And from China, Postmen in the Mountains follows the route of a rural mail carrier as he hands his job over to the son he has never really known. It also seemed obvious, if in a less banal way, and if there weren’t other promising films demanding my attention I might have watched all of it.

Cherishing its reputation for discovering unheralded films and filmmakers, the WFF keeps films that have already received attention at other festivals out of the competition. Of these, the hottest ticket was for Humanity, the French film that provoked a chorus of jeers and boos at Cannes this year when the jury, led by David Cronenberg, awarded it the Grand Jury Prize. The reaction of the Montreal audience, always partial to French films, was similar, if less vociferous, viewers presumably having been worn out by two and one-half hours of nothing happening, and happening very slowly at that. Any description of the film invariably makes it sound more interesting than it is: in a rural area of France, a policeman investigates the brutal rape and murder of a young girl. Still grieving over the death of his own wife and child several years ago, he is fascinated by a local woman, but makes so little demands on her that she often invites him to tag along with her and her brutish boyfriend. Humanity is composed of long, static scenes in which we are (presumably) invited to examine the characters’ emotions, to share in the quality for which the film is named. But a little of this goes a long way. Filmmaker Bruno Dumont, a former philosophy professor, uses non-professional actors, but unlike the Iranian filmmakers he expects too much from them, fixing the camera on their faces as if that mere act will render them fascinating to us. It doesn’t.

By comparison, the willful simplicity of Lovers was an unqualified success. Jean-Marc Barr, an actor who has appeared in films by Lars Von Trier, makes his directorial debut under the aegis of Dogma 95, the manifesto concocted by von Trier and other Danish filmmakers. Dogma 95 forbids any kind of technical trickery and demands that the filmmaker put himself at the service of his characters and situations. (Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration is the only Dogma 95 film thus far released in the US, though Von Trier’s The Idiots is scheduled for this fall.) Working in this liberatingly constrictive manner, Barr recaptures the giddy freshness of early New Wave films like Breathless in charting a romance between a Yugoslavian painter and a Paris bookstore clerk.

Possibly the most memorable film of this year’s WFF for me was one I saw by accident, squeezing it in simply because it filled a space between two other films I wanted to see. Here We Are Waiting For You takes its title from an inscription on the gates of a cemetery. In 75 minutes, documentarian Marcelo Masagao compiles a breathtaking summation of the 20th century via brief sketches of the lives of people who died here. The non-narrative nature of the film and the pulsing Michael Nyman-like score by composer Wim Martens (who did the music for Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect) invite comparison to Koyaanisqatsi, though I found Masagao’s superbly constructed and edited cameo sketches much more affecting. It would be a perfect midnight movie — in fact, this is the kind of film that could revive the midnight circuit.

Miramax, the studio most responsible for making the term “independent film” the equivalent of “alternative music,” was on hand with a slate of movies emphasizing culture clashes, including Happy Texas (escaped prisoners hide from the law by posing as gay pageant directors in a small Texas town), That’s The Way I Like It, (Saturday Night Fever in Singapore), and the best of the bunch, East is East (London-bred children of a Pakistani immigrant suffer their fathers insistence that they cling to unfamiliar Eastern ways, featuring sparkling performances from a first-rate ensemble of young actors).

But the true independent spirit was found in films made on a shoestring and brought to Montreal in hope of finding an audience. I admired the ambition of a film like Starry Nights, which imagines Vincent Van Gogh visiting the 1990s to see what has become of his work, even if the film itself was sadly amateurish.

Much more successful was The Pornographer, in which a repressed young man decides to turn his infatuation with pornographic videos into a career. Though it stands to gain exposure by cashing in on the porno chic engendered by Boogie Nights, writer-director Doug Atchison’s film avoids cheap thrills in favor of strong characterization and difficult moral questions.

Inevitably, there were films I just couldn’t get to, including The Legend of 1900 by Giuseppe (Cinema Paradiso) Tornatore; Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park; Carlos Saura’s Goya in Bordeaux, and Ettore Scola’s The Dinner. And of course there were those few films shown only in French versions, including Raul Ruiz’ Le Temps Retrouve and the controversial Romance by Catherine (36 Fillette) Breillat.