The New England Film & Video Festival is always marked by the diversity of its fare, and this year’s edition is no exception. The bulk of the entries — whether video, 16mm, or 35mm; animation, stop-motion, or live action — are shorts, and some are superb: Jesse Schmal’s George Grosz–esque animated “Sub!”, or Brian Papciak’s whirlwind stop-motion tour through a decrepit but sun-dappled insane asylum, “Wastelands: Met State.” But it’s the feature-length works that are the most impressive, and of these four stand out for their singular takes on the eccentricities of romance or the reverberations of war.

Lisa Kors’s sharp, funny Dinner and a Movie (Tuesday at 9 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner) follows Katie (charming Marianne Hagan), a beautiful, earnest documentarian whose dream is to profile Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Dreams are free, but food and shelter are not, so Katie’s obliged to play the Little Mermaid at children’s birthday parties, where she makes kids cry with her feminist rhetoric. (“If you wanna stay in this line of work,” a friend advises, “lay off the Camille Paglia.”) Later, a Western Massachusetts PBS producer agrees to fund Katie’s project on condition that she first produce a reality-TV series about dating in tiny Pittsfield. When a piggish hunk is set up with a string of dates and the results are filmed by Katie and her ex, a series of romantic entanglements ensue. Some are pleasingly original, others disappointingly predictable. Dinner is saved by its winning performances (especially Hagan and the late Paul Bartel in his final appearance) and smart, trenchant dialogue. And some scenes capture the banality of rural New England life. “This might be bigger than when Matt Damon came to the Pittsfield Mall,” the exec predicts of the show. Like Next Stop Wonderland, Dinner and a Movie is an appealing, if rough around the edges, local production that could easily have a larger audience to look forward to.

Another film in which the camera trains its lens on the craft of the documentarian — this one actually a documentary — is Nina Davenport’s Always a Bridesmaid (Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge), a winsome look at Davenport’s obsession with marriage and her fear, at the tender age of 30, of ending up an old maid. Perhaps she’s in the wrong line of work: her career as a wedding videographer keeps bringing her into contact with her biggest neurosis. At 98 minutes, Bridesmaid is a little long and at times a tad cloying. But Davenport videotapes everything: her conversations with friends, her private moments with her boyfriend, touching and affirming chats with old maids. When a friend sends her a tabloid article about a 90-year-old woman who finally tied the knot, Davenport flies cross-country to meet her. Especially funny are instances when her fixation betrays itself in her work, as when Davenport gets a little too close to the action at strangers’ weddings and is politely but firmly asked to back off.

Filmed in austere black-and-white, Bestor Cram & Mike Majoros’s An Unfinished Symphony (next Friday, March 30, at 8 p.m. at the MFA) looks back at Vietnam and the anti-war resistance — subjects that have seen no dearth of cinematic treatment. Footage of the 1971 protest in which Vietnam Veterans Against the War retraced Paul Revere’s ride backwards, by walking from Concord to Boston, is scored with Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 and peppered with commentary from historians like Howard Zinn. Intercut with chilling footage from Southeast Asia and textual accounts of the atrocities committed there, Symphony is harrowing. But the film’s point is to draw a parallel between these scruffy vets and the long history of dissent in the commonwealth, from the Minutemen through Thoreau. The most powerful moment comes when newly returned vet John Kerry tells Congress, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

A similar meditation is The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (next Saturday, March 31, at 1 p.m. at the MFA), John Gianvito’s sprawling look at the resonances of the video-game Gulf War, which we won so quickly and understood so glibly. The fictional victims include a returning vet, a troubled student who rails vainly against the war, and the title character, who suffers because of her married name. Mad Songs is long (168 minutes), and it does drag at times. But Gianvito’s grainy 16mm is perfect for the Southwest desert setting that echoes the inhospitable sands of the Arabian peninsula, and the hyper-realistic dialogue contributes to an unsettling but in the end redemptive experience.

Issue Date: March 22-29, 2001