Saab story - Swedish Auto is CIFF's opening-night feature.

I have been mistaken for a movie star on exactly two occasions. Both were at the Cleveland International Film Festival. The first time someone thought I was a Reichmuth brother. Understand that the Reichmuth Brothers are a couple of twins from the Pacific Northwest who have perfected a comedy act as a couple of inbred backwoods goobers who soliloquize lengthily about hunting Bigfoot or dealing with their ex-girlfriends' restraining orders and so forth. They had just shot their first feature, Fishing With Gandhi, which could best be described as Richard Linklater doing an "Ernest" film. They were at the CIFF in person for the screening. Someone got a look at me and just did the math.

The second time someone was sure they had seen me in some martial arts display. Coming off the Reichmuth debacle, I knew enough not to press for details.

Such things happen at the Cleveland International Film Festival, which takes over the multiplexes of Tower City Cinemas. It begins March 15 with Swedish Auto, a low-key regional romance-among-the-townies drama set on the margins of the college community of Charlottesville, Virginia, and produced by Chagrin Falls native Tyler Davidson. The festival continues onward for nine days, until March 25. It will be 10 Days That Shake the World, if you can visualize a cartoon vignette in which someone literally picks up the world, turns it upside down, and shakes the thing, until features and short subjects fall out of the hapless globe's inverted pockets like loose change.

It's truly coinage of all nations; amazing that nobody pays for admission in dinars or rubles. Not long ago, the CIFF welcomed its first Albanian production. This year there are entries from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Cuba, Croatia, Indonesia, Mali, Turkey, Uganda and Vietnam, and even countries the US isn't likely to go to war with in the imminent future like China, India, Switzerland, Canada and the UK. They cover the gamut from social-justice documentary to concert films to genre thrillers to experimental and non-narrative works.

A few years ago, a Gund Foundation grant enabled the Cleveland Film Society to add extra screens to the programming (a dwindling portion of Tower City Cinemas continues to play quotidian mainstream stuff for the duration; for a real cultural disconnect, wander from an auditorium showing the Serb drama Sutra ujutru into Wild Hogs). With the addition of some early-morning shows, some beginning at the 9 a.m. hour, and weekend late-night shows, this 31st annual CIFF has twice as many features than it had a decade ago.

It crests at about 120 features, give or take a last-minute addition or a print getting lost behind the lines in a combat zone (which has happened). And there's an equivalent heap of short subjects. This is more cinema than normal, healthy people see (or should see) in a year, high-density compressed in a week and a half.

Gone are the days when an all-access pass and careful planning could enable one to see nearly all the attractions. Now the CIFF is like having several competing satellite-TV movie channels and no Tivo, or even a VCR. Considering that some of these international films won't even show up on the Netflix radar, what to see?

A few favorites: The no-brainer is the Cannes Lions collection of World's Best Commercials, which the Film Society has graced with five separate showings (not counting encores). It will still likely sell out early. In good years these are more like feature-length collections of the utmost short subjects (that they're selling products is almost incidental). In off years, the worst that can happen is you saw a lot of these during the Super Bowl. But probably not on the big screen with a sellout crowd, where all the consumer button-pushing, largesse and artistry can be appreciated.

Beautiful Ohio (March 23 and 25) is an assured directorial debut by Chad Lowe, a pitch-perfect piece set in 1970s Cleveland (but, except for a few exteriors, shot elsewhere) about a bright teenager in a high-achieving Shaker Heights family having to live in the shadow of his older, maddeningly inscrutable math-genius brother, who converses in an invented language.

Hero Tomorrow 9 (March 16 and 18) is likely to be a sellout just for the relatives and cast and crew present. University of Akron graduates Ted Sikora and Milo Miller shot it here entirely, a comedy about a stalled creator of superhero comics taking on the guise of his own fictional avenger as an alternative to just mowing Cleveland lawns for a living. Now that's a reality check for anyone who actually thought the Spider-Man III premiere would be held at the CIFF.

A favorite of my CIFF memories is seeing an average guy, no innate interest in the festival, just at Tower City with a few hours to kill, who randomly checked out a Brooklyn-based boxing documentary, got knocked out by it (figuratively), and ended up in an animated conversation with the director. It was recalled by Boxers (March 23 and 24), an American documentary on an all-female team of amateur pugilists. One of its screenings is accompanied by the CIFF's occasional FilmForum panel discussions of filmmakers and experts. Another one complements Forgiving Dr. Mengele (March 18 and 19), a portrait of Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor, who opened up a hornets' nest when she officially forgave the Nazis as an act of liberation, and ends up trapped in somewhat absurdist situations of having her quality of mercy strained by angry Palestinians and fellow Jews.

Less heavy nonfiction includes the irresistible Mr. Pilipenko and His Submarine (March 20 and 22), a German documentary on a Ukrainian fellow who has been engrossed in building and eventually piloting his own vessel, the Dolphin, despite the conspicuous lack of a maritime environment in his barn in the landlocked steppe. It's like The Life Aquatic (With Steve Zissou) but with a point. A Map For Saturday (March 16, 17 and 22) is filmmaker Brook Silva-Braga's first-person account of backpacking around the world, while simultaneously exploring the mindset subculture of youth hostels and wanderers (up to age 75) who go on these extended DIY pan-continental adventures. In the context of the CIFF, most apt.

Midnight movies at film festivals have been in vogue ever since Sundance "broke" Blair Witch Project in 1999. The CIFF added witching-hour screenings a few years ago to honor adults-only and guilty-pleasure material, and this year the honorees are two programs of transgressive and edgy shorts; teen-slasher stuff from Norway, of all places, in Cold Prey (March 17 and 18); a satirical UK gore thriller called Severance (March 23 and 25), which is like Hostel but with a set of defense-business executives on a business retreat instead of horny kids; and The Ten (March 24 and 25), an all-star comedy violation of the Ten Commandments directed by Shaker Heights native David Wain, of cable TV's The State comedy troupe. You can leave the kids at home during these (and I notice that there used to be a family-film component of the CIFF, but it appears to have gone the way of that yellow-shirted guy in the Wiggles).

Attention should be paid to a visiting world-class filmmaker, one of the many VIPs who will be in the mix. But in 2007 you can meet in person, no, not the Reichmuth Bros. but rather Rolf de Heer of Australia. He has been a regular contributor to the CIFF and is now the subject of a slightly incomplete career retrospective. I wish there had been an inclusion of his 1998 film Dance Me to My Song, given the death since of cerebral-palsy-afflicted actress-writer Heather Rose Slattery, an unforgettable leading lady. But there is de Heer's latest, a recreation of Aborigine life entitled Ten Canoes (March 18) as well as a midnight revival (inevitably, necessarily) of his Bad Boy Bubby (March 17), one of the most talked-about and walked-out-of and cherished features in CIFF history.

A comprehensive program guide is available for free at area libraries and institutions (or check out the Web site clevelandfilm.org that summarizes in full the CIFF attractions and prices. And you can call the Cleveland Film Society at 216.623.FILM or toll-free at 866.865.FILM for box-office information.