It s hard to know exactly where to begin with this month s sprawling Buffalo International Film Festival. The movie celebration doesn t boast Hollywood premieres, buzz-generating indie features or planned visits by glamorous stars who paraded through last month s venerable Toronto International Film Festival.

But the film programs, each introduced by a guest speaker, offer an eclectic mix of five regional openings and one North American premiere of documentaries, independent and foreign-language films. There is also a collection of classic and seldom-seen motion pictures, as well as rare outtakes, which honor silent and spoken stars from Hollywood s Golden Age.

So, before asking for that real butter they squirt on popcorn at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center, where almost everything takes place, get familiar with the variety of cinematic offerings programmed by Edward Summer, the festival s director and founder.

Celebrating Chaplin

The festival kicks off with two nights celebrating Charlie Chaplin and his 1931 classic "City Lights."

Chaplin expert Frank Scheide, co-editor of "Chaplin: The Dictator and the Tramp," and "Chaplin s Limelight and the Music Hall Tradition," will show, for the first time publicly in the United States, two reels of "City Lights" outtakes starting at 7 tonight in the Market Arcade.

On Saturday, "City Lights" will be screened to music performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in Kleinhans Music Hall. Scheide will open the "City Lights" program with a talk on the British Mu-sic Hall score Chaplin wrote for the silent film. The talk is at 7 p. m. Saturday; the concert follows at 8 p. m.

Scheide, who teaches film history and criticism at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, cataloged 430 cans of film the London-born Chaplin made while working at the British Film Institute earlier this decade. That included material left over from "City Lights."

The Saturday screening of the film the American Film Institute in 2008 named the greatest romantic comedy ever made promises to be a special event, Scheide said.

"Seeing a silent film with appropriate live music is an experience unto itself, but when you see a silent film and an orchestra, it s like seeing a film and being at a concert at the same time," Scheide said.

Welles and Chaney

Chaplin is just one of several motion-picture titans being celebrated. The director s cut of Orson Welles 1958 "Touch of Evil," co-starring Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, will be shown at 7 p. m. Oct. 26 with a screening of the "lost" Lon Chaney film, "London After Midnight." Each will be introduced by Rick Schmidlin, a film producer and historian who over-saw restoration efforts for each.

"A lot of people consider Touch of Evil now as one of Welles best films. A younger, maverick audience seems to comprehend it even more than Citizen Kane because it has that cool, cutting edge," Schmidlin said. "It s one of the last of the great film noirs."

Welles, famously, first saw Universal Pictures cut of "Touch of Evil" in December 1957, before its theatrical release, and the next day sent a 58-page memo suggesting 48 changes that went ignored by studio brass.

In 1997, Schmidlin hired editor Walter Murch and a film historian to reedit the film as Welles had wanted. An original negative found in the vaults allows the film s widely acclaimed, 3-minute continuous tracking shot that opens the movie to be shown for the first time without the opening credits.

"We made all the changes Welles wanted," Schmidlin said.

The reedited film was honored by the Los Angeles Film Critics and New York Film Critics Circle when it was released in 1998.

Co-feature "London After Midnight," a lost silent film from 1927 whose last copy was destroyed in a fire in 1965, was reconstructed using still photographs.

" London is the very first vampire film made in North America, the first real American Goth film," Schmidlin said. "It s all stills, but it works for 46 minutes and you get to see the lost Chaney film."

This "Greed" is good

Schmidlin will also be on hand to explain how he reconstructed Eric Von Stroheim s masterful "Greed" using 650 stills. The 1924 silent film, which is shown at 6 p. m. on Oct. 24, runs just over four hours, with an intermission, close to double the length when first released.

"It s a film that has played 15 film festivals. For a silent film, it never loses its audience," Schmidlin said.

A Variety reviewer called the reconstructed film "revelatory" and "a triumph of film restoration." This marks the first time Buffalo gets to see what the fuss was about.

Other highlights

The festival will debut its first Al Boasberg Comedy Awards at 7 p. m. Sunday in ComedySportz Arena (4476 Main St., Snyder). It s named for the famous Buffaloborn comedy writer of vaudeville, radio and film. The Marx Brothers "A Night at the Opera," one of Boasberg s 47 film-writing credits, also will be shown.

"The Minority," a 2007 film by Dwayne Buckle, tells the story of a suddenly unemployed African-American man whose experience is compounded by racial prejudice. Buckle will be on hand at 7 p. m. Wednesday to introduce the film.

A new documentary, "Walt and El Grupo," at 7 p. m. Thursday, and the 1944 classic animated film "Three Caballeros," showing at 7 p. m. next Friday, will be presented as a tribute to the opening earlier this month of Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

Both films concern Disney s participation in the "Good Neighbor Program" initiated by Nelson Rockefeller in 1941 to counter fascist influence in South American countries.

Four cartoons, each focused on an individual country, were eventually incorporated into "Three Caballeros." A South American visit by Walt Disney and his entourage was the basis of the "Walt and El Grupo" documentary.

"This was one goodwill tour that actually did create some good will, and in a big way, too," said J. B. Kaufman, a staff writer for the Walt Disney Family Foundation who will introduce the films.

"Fantasia hadn t yet opened in South America, so the openings there were timed to coordinate with the tour. Walt was a rock star down there," said Kaufman, author of "South of the Border with Disney."

The documentary will open at the North Park Theatre for a limited run starting Oct. 23.

The 2005 movie "Proud: The Men of the USS Mason," about the only African-American sailors to take a warship into combat during World War II, was filmed in Buffalo. Most of the film was shot aboard the USS The Sullivans, with one scene from the USS Little Rock.

"In our culture, if you don t have a movie about you, you re not guaranteed a place in history," director Mary Pat Kelly told The News at the time of the film s opening. "There has never been an African-American movie on World War II in the theaters."

Kelly, who wrote "Proudly We Served," the book on which the film is based, will be on hand at 7 p. m. Oct. 17 to introduce the film along with Lorenzo DeFau, a crew member aboard the USS Mason who was played by Ossie Davis in the film.

With old-fashioned Saturday matinees in mind, Summer has paired the 1953 3-D science-fiction film "It Came From Outer Space," with those challenging red and green specs, with a chapter from a Buck Rogers serial and a Fleischer cartoon featuring a bouncing ball.

The ailing Ray Bradbury, who wrote "Outer Space," has prepared a special video greeting for the occasion, which begins at 2 p. m. Oct. 17 in the North Park.

A different program, at 6 p. m. Oct. 21, will highlight the works of B-horror movie director Charles Band, best known for his series of "Puppet Master" films. Band will introduce his 1992 film "Doctor Mordrid," an homage to the Marvel comic-book character Dr. Strange.

"Charlie has a wonderful, tongue-in-cheek sense of adventure fantasy," Summer said.

Comics writer Will Eisner produced the series "The Spirit" that for many years was tucked inside the funny pages (and printed at Greater Buffalo Press). He was also influential in establishing the graphic novel as a literary form.

"Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist" will have its regional premiere at 7 p. m. Oct. 19, with director and producer Andrew Cooke on hand to introduce the film.

"One of the goals of the film is to get the importance of Will Eisner and the origins of the graphic novel out to a broader audience," Cooke said.

The festival will offer the North American premiere of "Pearl in the Forest," a rare movie made in Mongolia. The film, which screens at 7 p. m. Oct. 22, retraces the history of different ethnic groups in the country during the rise of Soviet communism, leading to a Stalinist purge.

Director Agvaantseren Enkhtaivan, also an opera singer, wrote the music, too.

Christophe Gauge of Erie, Pa., the son-in-law of Enkhtaivan, said Mongolian movies are a rarity. Many in the cast are from the Buryat village of Dadal, which he said adds to the film s authenticity.

"This is one of the first movies in Mongolia to speak openly about the rise of communism. It was not something openly talked about until recently," Guest said.

Some filmmakers and cast members have applied for visas to attend the screening.

Producers David Heeley and Joan Kramer will show previously unscreened movie clips of Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire from past documentaries they collaborated on at 7 p. m. Oct. 23.

"People can expect to see footage of Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire that no one has ever publicly seen, because these clips have never been shown," Summer said. "And they have wonderful stories about working with Kate and Fred."

There will also be a question-and-answer session.

Also on tap is the Western New York premiere of the critically acclaimed documentary "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," which will be shown at 2 p. m. Oct. 25.

The film tells the story of how Christian and Muslim women united to resist the murderous policies of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor earlier this decade.

The New York Times called the film "uplifting, disheartening, inspiring, enraging"; the Los Angeles Times said it was a "marvelous documentary." "Pray the Devil" will be introduced by its producer, Abby Disney.

Another regional premiere, the French "Dans La Vie" ("Two Ladies"), concerns a cranky, wheelchair-bound Jewish widow who meets her match in a Muslim woman hired to be her caretaker, opening the door to some important lessons about tolerance and open-mindedness.

Vitascope Hall was arguably the first permanently built movie theater in the world when it opened in the basement of Ellicott Square in 1896. Summer has said Buffalo s believed singular role in the history of motion picture exhibition was an inspiration to start the film festival.

Rick Altman will be in Ellicott Square at 3 p. m. on Oct. 18 to present "The Living Nickelodeon," recapping the early years of motion pictures and the places they were viewed.

Want to go?

The Buffalo International Film Festival starts today and runs through Oct. 27. Tickets are

sold at the door and through the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra box office. Adult tickets for

the movies are $10, with discounted prices for students, seniors and children. Tickets for

"City Lights" with the BPO range from $29.50 to $74.50.

For a complete list of films and show times, go to www.buffalofilmfestival.com.