• In the golden-orange-toned "Buried Treasure," an immigrant from Nigeria travels to Burkina Faso to daily descend into a deep, narrow and dusty shaft in search of gold, and in "The Devil Came on Horseback," an American witnesses the catastrophic genocide going on in Darfur.

• The kidnapping of young Mexican girls told about in the documentary "Bajo Juarez" is mirrored in the feature film "Trade," in which Kevin Kline plays a cop helping a young boy to find his little sister before she is sold in a sex-slave auction near the U.S./Mexican border.

• The international flavor of this year's films took us to the 1950s war in Korea as well as the 1990s war in Chechnya, and also to Tunisia, Bolivia, Brazil, Thailand, India, the Uighur region in northwest China, the bleak Russian seacoast and even to the moon.

• And this year's films — documentaries and feature films alike — seemed unusually social-minded, dealing with autism, stuttering, deafness, Alzheimer's, senility, HIV/AIDS, homosexuality, mental illness, rape, sexual perversion, masochism, racism and — yes — the effects of global warming.

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So what films, finally — out of the 60 or 70 that I saw — were those that will stay with me the longest?

Probably the shocking tour-de-force film from Denmark called "Offscreen"; the charming and haunting love story about two street musicians in Ireland, titled "Once"; the captivating French film "Blame It on Fidel"; the dazzlingly cinematic "Slipstream," in which Anthony Hopkins not only stars but for which he also wrote, directed and composed the music; and the intensely raw Southern film "Black Snake Moan," set in a small Tennessee town and starring Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake.

And two more that I enthusiastically look forward to seeing again.

• First, Great Britain's "Longford," written by the same marvelous writer, Patrick Marber, who also wrote Oscar nominees "The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland." Inspired by real events, it stars the remarkable Jim Broadbent as Lord Longford, who risked his reputation with his obsession with a young woman in prison who had been an accomplice to one of the most terrible series of crimes in the history of England.

• And the second is the remarkable documentary "Wonders Are Many," which not only lets us see the exciting creation and rehearsal of John Adam's new opera "Doctor Atomic" (based on the final 48 hours before the first atomic-bomb test in 1945), but also lets us in on many startling and enlightening facts about J. Robert Oppenheimer and his young collaborators (all in their 20s) who created that terrible first bomb.

For me this was such a fascinating festival that I can hardly wait for Sundance 2008.

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E-mail: marshalldj@iveracity.com