And on Sunday, it was over. Nineteen film programs and the 2007 Spokane International Film Festival is done. Time to get some sleep.

But first … tonight’s final film was the Iranian effort “From Afar.” Directed by Ramin Mohseni, who up until this film was a television and documentary filmmaker, it tells the story of an Iranian man (Korosh Tahami) during three different periods in his life.

In the first, “Book Burning,” he is a student, studying screenwriting, whose love of books is tested when the demand of simply finding a place to live causes him to look for money that he simply doesn’t have. The second, “Breathing,” features him as a businessman who is more concerned with the wife (Behnaz Jafari) who has left him than he is with making his business actually go.

And in the third, he is an architect who, while being forced to change a project he has been working on, finds himself facing the potential death of his father (Jamshid Hashempour).

The father figure looms in the previous chapters, too. In the first, the father is represented in a book that the student reads about a bookseller living in ancient times who strives to protect his cache of literature in the face of what looks to be Mongol invaders. In the second, he is a painter who specializes in portraying a mysterious landscape that the businessman finds soothing to his emotions.

In the third, he is the loving man who has come to Tehran to see the doctor – only to discover that he is seriously ill.

Much less direct than any of the other Iranian films that I have seen – which include “The White Balloon,” “The Apple,” “Children of Heaven,” “The Circle,” “Crimson Gold,” “Turtles Can Fly,” “The Color of Paradise,” “Under the Skin of the City” and especially the Kurdish film “A Time for Drunken Horses” – “From Afar” is a virtual visual poem.

Yet it does end up representing our protagonist’s progress toward a spiritual goal, represented first by knowledge, then business success, then love, then the lure of nature and finally, the word of God that he learned as a child from his father.

Fitting that the fulfillment of his quest would mark the end of SpIFF 2007, too.

“The Fall of ’55,” which opened the final day of the 2007 Spokane International Film Festival, involves the kind of story that – similar to several incidents that have taken place in Spokane – people get tired of hearing.

In this case, the story concerns a series of arrests of gay men in Boise, Idaho, that started in the fall of 1955.

As one letter writer asked Boise’s daily newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, when it ran a story a few years ago detailing the sad outcome of one man directly involved with one of the arrested men, why do we have to again be subjected to such “smut”?

Well, because we have short memories. And because we don’t like to look at parts of society that, being on the fringe of the overall culture as gays and lesbians were in 1955 – especially in an All-American city in the Inland Northwest – are often discriminated against.

Do we remember, for example, that one of the biggest self-appointed foes of Communism in government during that same period was Sen. Joe McCarthy? And that gay men were often targeted as being likely to give Communist a foothold in government? And, finally, do we remember the irony that Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s most able assistant, was himself gay?

Oh, yeah, hypocrisy and deceit are other reasons why we revisit such issues. “The Fall of ’55,” which tries to be painfully fair – maybe too fair – to everyone involved in the controversy, does a good job of showing us what Boise looked like that half century ago.

Using interviews with people, both archival and new, plus footage of the city taken from newsreels, private collections and official archives, director Seth Randal has revived a time in America when fear again controlled the reaction to a series of crimes, both real and merely perceived, turning the reaction into a wave of hysteria.

I wish he had spent more time explaining the difference between the actual crimes that were committed – i.e., sex with underage boys – and those acts that were nothing more than an overreaction to what was seen as “perverted” behavior between consenting adults.

That said, any argument against blind prejudice is worth seeing. And any story about such prejudice is worth telling. Again and again.

There have been some stupid wars in my lifetime, at least one of which I served in. But historical imperatives aside, among the most absurd was the Argentina-British war over the Falkland Islands – which the Argentines call Las Malvinas – in 1982.

This wind-swept group of moss-covered rocks about 400 miles east of the Argentine mainland has been a source of dispute between the British and Argentina for centuries. But it wasn’t until 1982, when Argentina was caught up in an economic and political crisis, that the military junta in Buenos Aires decided to press its case by invading.

Britain, led by Margaret Thatcher, was having its own problems. So it served the purposes of both governments to go to war – historically the thing to do when you want to take your population’s mind off their dismal lives.

Whatever the reason for the war, the islands ended up being a killing site (some estimates are that more than 900 soldiers died, about 650 of them Argentine). The British ended up victorious, though as poor as Argentina was and as incompetent as its leaders were that’s not exactly something to brag about.

The war and its aftermath was an issue during tonight’s first program of the 2007 Spokane International Film festival. The film “Iluminados por el fuego” – which could be translated as “Enlightened by Fire” – is an Argentine-produced film about the war and the effect it had on the Argentine soldiers who fought it.

Told in flashback, the movie involves a couple of veterans whose lives have taken different paths. Gaston Pauls plays a journalist named Esteban who receives a phone call from a woman (Virginia Innocenti) who tells him that one of his Malvinas vet buddies, Vargas (Pablo Ribbia) has tried to commit suicide.

As the movie progresses, Esteban discovers just how hard his buddy’s life has been. And as he learns this, he begins to recall his own war experiences – which we then relive as well. We are there as Esteban and Vargas and the third member of their group, Juan, suffer from the cold, the win, the lack of support and the sadism of their so-called leaders.

And as a generation of American vets of the Vietnam War before them, the Argentine veterans of the Falkland Islands War return to a nation that could care less about them. Some, such as Esteban, submerge their memories and survive. Others, such as Vargas, never quite recover.

“Iluminados por el fuego” is a low-budget production. And, in the end, it tends to dip a bit toward melodrama, with songs that spell out what the filmmaker has already shown us: shame, pain and regret.

But it’s an effective anti-war statement involving a conflict that many people don’t remember outside of Britain and Argentina. And the Argentines, at least, have made their remembrance into a piece of cinematic art.

Tonight’s two programs at the 2007 Spokane International Film Festival included two feature-length documentaries, the Norwegian film “Loop” and the Hurricane Katrina movie “Dark Water Rising: Survival Stories of Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues.”

Of the two, I was drawn more to “Loop,” an existential exploration focusing on the experiences of a quartet of men: an old guy hanging in a mountain cabin, an EMT who spends his summers in a fire lookout tower, a guy who climbs sheer cliffs by himself (only then to BASE jump from the summit) and, finally, two guys who do pretty much nothing but fish and extreme ski.

The film asks a simple question: What is life, and what are we doing with it? It makes the argument that our typical way of being in the world, filling our every moment with work and seldom taking time to enjoy the simple miracle of being, is a loop that takes effort to break. Each of the characters, each in his own way, makes that break.

The Katrina movie, “Dark Water Rising,” follows a story that has a built-in sympathy factor: abandoned and needy pets. The problem is, the film tries to do too much at once.

Katrina was a disaster. And up until now, most of the stories have been about the result in human suffering and the incompetence of governmental response. “Dark Water Rising” is unique in that it deals with the animals the departing humans left behind.

Filmmaker Mike Shiley does that by looking at the overall process of animal rescue. We meet members of the U.S. Humane Society, the SPCA and volunteers from both organizations that come from all over the United States.

But the most interesting characters in the film are the “renegades,” the independent volunteers who came to New Orleans, were turned down for one reason or another but, instead of going home, stuck around and did rescue work on their own. The group we get to know best works out of an abandoned Winn-Dixie store.

It’s no secret that the best way to make a documentary is to find some interesting characters and then follow them doing whatever it is they do. Take “Murderball,” for example. As long as “Dark Water Rising” follows the Winn Dixie volunteers, the film crackles with attitude. When it steps away from them, it becomes a public service announcement.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that you have to wonder what the film might have been had Shiley gone with what works best.

Following is the first of two posts involving writer Sherman Alexie’s talk Tuesday night at Gonzaga University:

If you’ve never listened to Sherman Alexie give a talk, you’ve missed a chance to hear a poet masquerade as a stand-up comic. Or vice versa.

On Tuesday night at Gonzaga University’s Cataldo Hall, which has an official capacity of 410, was jammed with students, faculty, special guests and just anyone else who happened to hear about the closed-campus special event.

And 410 is hardly the official count. Because the event was free, no one was counting heads. But event organizer Tod Marshall, a GU professor of English, says they put down 425 chairs. Few were available, and people lined up along both sides of the room and in back. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that 500 or more showed.

Sherman was worth the effort. After a short but passionate introduction by Raymond Reyes, GU’s associate vice president for diversity, Sherman talked and then answered questions for the better part of the next two hours.

The talk was pure Sherman: at times R-rated, always challenging, mostly funny, never less than penetratingly intelligent. Here are some highlights, taken from the notes that I scrawled in the dark:

After Reyes explained that Sherman’s passion was palpable – “Sherman spontaneously combusts with the moment,” he said – Sherman took the stage. “I gotta live up to that?” he asked. “Did you just compare me to a Burning Bush?”

It wouldn’t be the last time that Sherman would say things some would consider, uh, blasphemous. The blasphemy extended even to basketball. “We Seattle GU alums always make jokes about the countdown to the recruiting scandal,” he said.

Overall, his talk took two paths: He explained about his own two-year experience at GU (he ended up earning his bachelor’s degree at Washington State University), and he told a story about his collecting his grandfather’s World War II medals on the Oprah Winfrey show.

He talked about visiting former basketball star Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s house, which was built with the owner’s 7-feet-2 frame in mind. “I sat on the couch,” he said. “My feet dangled. I sat on the toilet. (pause) My feet dangled.”

He even called his father: “Dad,” he said, “I’m doing No. 2 in Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s house.”

Sherman took after one of his favorite topics: Seattle liberals.

“In Seattle, no matter what the protest is, there are always people dressed as sea turtles,” he said. Liberal in his own opinions, he saves most of his enmity for the “narcissistic” people on both sides of the political spectrum who resort to fundamentalism.

He talked about a protest he saw on television in which a woman was carrying a sign that said “Vegans for World Peace.” He railed at the arrogance of those who would think that their eating habits are equivalent with an issue as important as world peace.

“You never see a sign that says, ‘Meat Eaters for World Peace,’ ” he said.

He said those who believe that humans and animals are equal are wrong. He cited religious texts of the major religions that state that humans hold “dominion.”

“The day you get a cow up here to beat me in a poetry slam is the day I’ll stop eating them,” he said.

He hates homophobia and hates the protests against gay marriage, especially the assertions that the notion of gay marriage threatens traditional marriage.

“Gay men don’t threaten my marriage,” he said. “You know who threatens my marriage? Good-looking straight women with no boundaries.”

The saddest thing about Sunday’s late showing at the 2007 Spokane International Film Festival involved the Spokane filmmaker Irv Broughton. But I can’t choose which exact moment made me feel the worst.

Was it Broughton’s inability to speak on stage following a phone conversation with his friend George Garrett, the subject of his documentary film “News of the Spirit: “The Storytelling of George Garrett”? As Broughton explained, Garrett – who is in his late 70s – is gravely ill.

Or was it the story that Broughton told about how, in trying to raise money for the movie that he has been trying to make for three decades, he once lost seven minutes of irreplaceable film footage?

Both stories are enough to make Mike Ditka cry.

Broughton’s film is a loving look at a man who, while being a fine writer, is the kind of generous soul who attracts the love of those who get to know him. A natural storyteller, Garrett isn’t – as Broughton’s film shows – above changing the truth to make a story funnier, more complete, more fulfilling.

But nobody seems to mind too much. The ranks of those interviewed in Broughton’s film, which include not only other writers but biographers, other academics and long-time friends, all make that clear enough.

Broughton’s film is in clear contrast to the other biographical documentary the 2007 has shown: “ ‘Hello Again, Everybody’: The Harry Caray Story.” That loving look at the late baseball announcer has a feel of PR to it. Broughton’s film is less PR than mere admiration and love.

It makes a difference. Even Mike Ditka could see that.

The festival take a sabbatical until Thursday, when it resumes with a couple of documentaries: at 6 p.m. the Norwegian documentary “Loop” plays (plus a short “The Hunter”), followed at 8 with “Dark Water Rising” (preceded by the short “I Am an Apartment Building”).

See you then.

Sunday’s afternoon program of the 2007 Spokane International Film Festival wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that you’d normally want to see following lunch. Not unless you’ve got a fair amount of caffeine coursing through your system.

The film, a Thailand import titled “Stories from the North,” is a slow, poetic look at rural life in the northern half of the country. It’s shot as a documentary, though it follows a narrative plot style. Broken up into several sections, the film tells the stories of a man losing his buffalo, what appears to be in itinerant musician, a man living a lonely life on a river, children telling ghost stories, an old woman ruing her long life … and so on.

Throughout, filmmaker Uruphong Raksasad seldom intrudes, using a faux cinema vérité style with long takes, little dialogue and slow, slow pacing. It’s ultimately beautiful, and it captures everyday Thai life in a way that is seemingly authentic. But it was, at times, hard to keep from dozing off.

The short that preceded the film, an Indonesian film titled “Kara, Daughter of a Tree,” uses a similar film style to tell the story of a young girl who, following her mother’s death giving her birth, ends up fighting against what appears to be encroaching modernity – everything from a man with a camera to Ronald McDonald.

Eventually, it appears, modernity wins. At least that was the interpretation from this corner.

Next up at 5 p.m.: Irv Broughton’s seemingly century-long documentary on the novelist/poet/college professor George Garrett, “News of the Spirit: The Storytelling of George Garrett.”

On Friday at the 2007 Spokane International Film Festival, the guys who directed the short “Jack the Vomiter” talked about a recent award that they won in a Seattle festival. One of the four, Mike Corrigan, explained the prize to me this way in an e-mail:

“We won Best Short at the Northwest Film Forum’s ‘Local Sightings’ Festival in Seattle. It totally blew us away. The judge’s panel included the editor of Filmmaker Magazine, a guy from the Independent Film Channel and a guy from Sundance, among others. I was just stoked those guys saw and liked it. But we also scored $2,500 cash (Altoids was a corporate sponsor) and $2,500 worth of rentals/services from NWFF.”

One of the four, Travis Hiibner (the other two are Derrick King and Gary McLeod) pointed out on Friday that the award obligated them now to “pimp for Altoids.”

Nice to see that success hasn’t gone to their heads.

When Jasmine Dellal played her film “American Gypsy” at the Spokane International Film Festival in 2000, it was a hit. In fact, it was one of the biggest hits that SpIFF has ever experienced.

It filled the 750-some-seat Met.

Tonight’s screening of Dellal’s second film (she’s done a couple of TV series for British television) was a different story. The Met is now called the Bing Crosby Performing Arts Center. And whether it was because of the skating championships, because of other things going on or Spokane’s typical moviegoing apathy, the theater was less than half full.

Which is too bad because her new film, “When the Road Bends: Tales of a Gypsy Caravan,” is worth watching. Not only does it introduce the audience to new cultures, Gypsy/Roma hailing from India, Romania, Spain and Macedonia, but it follows musical performers from those countries on a six-seek-long concert tour that took place in 2001.

If you did miss the film, you’ll get a second chance this summer when the film – as Dellal promises – gets a theatrical release. Or, after that, on DVD.

Not that it’s a perfect film. Truth is, it’s about 20 minutes too long. And the music, which ranges from Spanish Flamenco to a Macedonian “Queen of the Gypsies” named Esma Redzepova, isn’t to everyone’s taste.

But Dellal is a decent filmmaker. And “When the Road Bends,” even if it didn’t fill The Bing, is worth a look. And listen.

Ninjas and skateboarders: What do they have in common? Besides a bit of blood flowing now and then, the correct answer is the Spokane International Film Festival.

And let’s not forget the vomit.

Up on the screen of the Bing Crosby Performing Arts Center during the first full day of 2007 SpIFF were two features: “Rising Son: The Legend of Skateboarder Christian Hosoi” and “Shinobi.”

“Rising Son” is a documentary that tells the story of Hosoi, one of the gang that came along after the original Dogtown crowd, immortalized in the Stacy Peralta doc “Dogtown and Z-Boys” and the narrative flick “Lords of Dogtown.”

While filled with lots of good skating footage, plus interviews with everyone from Tony Hawk to actor Jason Lee, “Rising Son” basically tells the same story that “Dogtown” does with a lot more skill – and originality. And the digital cinematography looks more washed out than a decade-old tie-dyed t-shirt.

“Shinobi” is an “X-Men” variation done like a standard samurai movie. One character carries claws that look like Wolverine’s, another’s kiss kills quicker than Rogue’s and a third has eyes that are nearly as strong as those wielded by Cyclops. But the story is pure Kurosawa, blended with a bit of Ang Lee.

The shorts that preceded the features had familiar feels to them. The first, “Jack the Vomiter,” reimagines the Jack the Ripper tale as the story of a man who believes that killing is an art form – part of the process being, it seems, drenching the crime scene in barf. The codirectors – Mike Corrigan, Travis Hiibner, Derrick King and Gary McLeod – were featured in last year’s festival with their short, “What’s in the Barn.”

And then there was James Dunnison’s 2002 short “Organ Music,” the only film so far to be commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Society – the organization that sponsors SpIFF.

Day two is down, and Saturday looks to be a long one, with film programs at 11 a.m., 2 p.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.

If you haven’t seen any of the films, yet, you might want to head on down to the Bing. There’s bound to be something you like – even if there are no more ninjas or skateboarders.

Saturday’s schedule includes baseball and Gypsies. Almost as good.