What's the best antidote for a faint feeling of film-festival overkill? What else but another festival, this one young enough to be called "fresh," even by an inveterate fest-vet. The upstart Taos Talking Pictures Festival, in its third year, is clearly intelligent, nicely wide-ranging, with a warm, open feeling that brings back memories of Telluride's first decade.

There, on the second weekend of April in northern New Mexico, at the Oo-Oonah theater in the shadow of the Taos pueblo, you could watch a cowboys-and-Indians action-adventure melodrama in which the heroes were the Indians and the cowboys were the villains. There, as part of the festival's interest in media literacy, this year's Artist in Residence was Joey Skaggs, hoaxer—er, media activist—extraordinaire. And there, the event's grand prize, for what has been called "the most innovative filmmaking," is five acres of prime Taos land.

(Disclaimer here: I was part of this year's Innovation Award jury; I also presented the closing night film, the French charmer When the Cat's Away, a light comedy with serious underpinnings, discovered at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, and set to open in theaters soon.)

That rousing "western" was the 1973 Apachen (Apaches), one of a dozen "Indianerfilme," made in East Germany between 1966 and 1983, and even watching it subtitled on video couldn't dampen its pure joy. These pictures, shot in Yugoslavia, Romania, the Soviet Union, Mongolia, and even Cuba, taught awed East German kids about the Old West from a resoundingly Socialist point of view, which here on this red clay felt just about right.

Their central "Indian" was Gojko Mitic, a striking Yugoslav athlete with good cheekbones and presumably a daily application of ManTan, who rode his Russian horses like the wind. (In this one, Mitic played Ulzana; for an interesting shift in values, check out Robert Aldrich's 1972 Ulzana's Raid in which Burt Lancaster, as an Indian scout, sets out to bring down the renegade Ulzana.) Believe me, you have not heard cheering until you've watched Mitic triumph on the screen of this small, Indian-run arts center, with an audience of Taos Indians and current Taos residents.

(The seeds of these movies are rooted deeply. Jens Wazel, who presented Apachen at Taos, was once an open-mouthed East German kid himself. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wazel, now 6'5" and no longer a kid, came to the United States as a graduate student. He now works—where else?—as a tools developer for Microsoft, and on the side waxes eloquent about these films, intact memories from another boyhood. He has them on a web site, naturally: http://www.speakeasy.org/wildeast.)

Like the packed Apachen screening, Joey Skaggs' program was at another free venue, across town just off the center plaza of Taos, and crammed to the walls. Documentarian Frederick Marx (Hoop Dreams), who's halfway through a film on Joey, used the phrase "McLuhan in a clown's suit" as he introduced Skaggs, who presented highlights from 30 years of scam artistry, done both solo and with a company of like-minded actors.

You leave this man's gradually deepening performance art wiser, if not sadder. It may not be possible to feel sad about UPI ("They hate me," Skaggs said, beaming), about Diane Sawyer, about CNN, about all who have rushed to their deadlines with coverage of Skaggs' gags and dimwit press releases, without a second's pause to check them out.

Did anyone bother to call the California diocese of which "the Rev. Anthony Joseph" was purportedly a member, when he arrived at the 1992 Democratic convention pedaling the Portofess, a confessional box mounted on trike wheels that looked a little like a religious outhouse? Not even his motto, "Religion on the go for people on the move," was enough to get anyone to check.

Skaggs' recent coup, hot on the heels of the O.J. Simpson verdict, was "the Solomon project" by "Dr. Joseph Bonuso" of NYU, who had created a computer program that would replace juries, and one of whose first verdicts "convicted" Simpson. (Simpson joined the computer's other "convictees" Claus von Bulow, the brothers Menendez, and William Kennedy Smith, while it acquitted Mike Tyson.)

Skaggs' own feeling is that his scams work because of our hunger to see our own prejudices/beliefs/opinions validated. He was certainly a brilliant choice for a festival whose core programming includes a commitment to "media literacy."

The festival was canny enough to include works that seem almost mandatory for a film gathering in Taos: the ultracontroversial, New Mexico-made Salt of the Earth for example, about a NM miners' strike from the point of view of labor. More people have probably heard about this film, made by blacklisted artists Paul Jarrico, Herbert Biberman, and Michael Wilson, than have seen in the decades since it was made, in 1953.

Another natural was Philip Kaufman's lyrical White Dawn, in a crisp new print, with the eloquent, self-effacing Kaufman there to receive the festival's second Howard Hawks Storyteller Award. (Jim Jarmusch collected it last year, with a screening of Dead Man.)

There was the angry, passionate Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, about the 1991 standoff between the Canadian Army in Quebec and members of the Mohawk Nation. It's by the ardent, regal Alanis Obomsawin, a 30-year veteran documentarian and activist of the Abenaki tribe in Canada, whose words stilled even the cocktail chatter at the awards ceremony, as she stepped up to receive the Taos Mountain Award Saturday night.

"I could almost not keep my eyes on the road, driving here," she said, her eyes shining, "because of the color of the earth. Some of it is wine-red, some of it brown-red, some is blood-red. I hope you all know that this red earth is sacred, and you must really respect it." One does not look at that earth the same way after the tone and the passion of Obomsawin's words.

Even in its third year (when a emerging festival has to plead to get first-rate films), Taos seems to be casting its worldwide net successfully. From the Czech Republic came the hilarious, seditious, erotic comedy Conspirators of Pleasure, by Jan Svankmejer, with more live-action than usual from the great surrealist puppet animator.

Interesting to see the reaction to Svankmejer's rainbow of personal erotic turn-ons among this Taos audience, nearly 85 percent local, and a mixture of artists and affluent retirees. First, polite titters; then a few walkouts; then its outrageousness simply crashed through any reserve, and they were whooping with glee. (It will be at the Seattle International Film Festival shortly, and then nationally in theaters.)

Among the strong fiction and documentary programming, my personal choices would be two documentaries, Green Chimneys and Nobody's Business, and a glowingly handsome debut feature, Under the Bridge, which won its writer-director, Charles Weinstein, the Breakthrough award from MovieMaker magazine.

In Alan Berliner's elegant and moving memoir, Nobody's Business, his interviewing is like hand-to-hand combat, as the filmmaker pries personal history about his family's Russian and Polish roots from his irascible, rocklike father. Exhausting and enthralling in equal parts, the great news is that the film will be the opener on P.O.V. The American Documentary the week of June 3 on PBS.

Constance Marks's Green Chimneys follows four youngsters from abusive or neglectful families, rescued (although not, alas, all of them) through the tireless and impassioned staff of the Green Chimneys farm/rehabilitation facility in Brewster, New York, where the kids work one-on-one with animals. Unsentimental, deeply affecting, masterfully shot—much of it from a slightly low angle, which reinforces its intimacy with the kids—this was the winner of the coveted five acres in Taos, the "innovation" award.

The land donor, maverick filmmaker-land developer Jeff Jackson, said as he presented the stunned Marks her award that "innovation can also mean something simpler and more profound than technical experimentation or artistry. It can also be film that has the potential to affect and change our society, by illuminating important issues to the public."

Accepting nearly tearfully, Marks brought her cameraman, James Miller, on stage, saying that there were days, among the 200 hours of shooting, as Miller worked in small cramped rooms, when he had to come out for her to wipe away his tears so that he could continue. And—that the two of them are now engaged. One can only hope that Green Chimneys, which got ecstatic reviews during its debut at Sundance, also finds its way—like Nobody's Business—to the largest audience possible.

With luck, every festival includes a personal encounter that fixes it in your mind. Telluride, among many memories, brought that great Russian comet, Larissa Sheptiko, a filmmaker killed tragically two years later. Taos' were two travelers from Prague, the soulful star of Conspirators of Pleasure, Anna Weslinka, and the young translator-journalist with her, Tomas Baldynsky.

Somehow, you never see your country as clearly as when you're with visitors to it. These two were humbling: warm and ironic in a playful way that seems distinctly Czech, and encyclopedic about not just their own cinema and the world's, but about books, art, and the political face of Eastern Europe. Stepping out into the blue-purple Taos night, after four hours of ping-ponging talk (in nonstop translation) to see Hale-Bopp shimmering on the horizon seemed some sort of benediction.

This is the essence of what you hope to find in a gathering of film lovers. Not simply good, fresh films, but a rare synchronicity. It's hard to get when a festival gets too hot, when every picture comes with a publicity engine driving it. It may be only possible in a strong, good, young festival. But it's with Taos now, and let's hope it doesn't wear off for years.

© 1997 by Sheila Benson. All rights reserved.