Santa Barbara Film Festival a Success Story : Movies: The event features more than 90 titles and is well-received despite signs of financial strain.

Despite grumbling about funding, teeth-gnashing and general alarm about an uncertain future, the 10-day Santa Barbara International Film Festival turned out to be one of the strongest in the festival’s seven-year history, in artistic depth and reaction from the audience.

The festival, which concluded its schedule Sunday with a screening of the Oscar-winning Italian film “Mediterraneo,” featured more than 90 titles, among them domestic and foreign features, documentaries, short subjects and local films.

The festival began as a brave new idea designed to marry art and tourism, pushed into being by founding director Phyllis de Piccioto. The city’s Events and Festivals Committee granted start-up money with the stipulation that other sources of funding would take over in a few years. This year, the committee cut its grant by half and the festival made up the difference with private contributions and corporate aid.

Signs of financial strain this year were evident. Past festivals have generated more of a visible presence and more of a buzz on the streets by distributing screenings at several theaters around town. Most of this year’s festival was cloistered in the Fiesta Theater multiplex downtown. During the two main weekend schedules, the die-hard festival-goer could spend from morning to midnight at the Fiesta without seeing the light of day.

The opening-night gala was devoted to the premiere of the meek HBO film “The Last of His Tribe,” with Jon Voight and Graham Greene as Ishi. (Greene also appears as a terrorist American Indian in the Canadian feature “Clearcut,” screened the next day at the festival.)

A select few films were eligible for the Best of the Fest Award voted on by the audience, which went to the 1991 film “Diary of a Hit Man,” co-produced by former Santa Barbara resident Tim Healey. Directed by Roy London, the film stars Forrest Whitaker as a hit man suddenly stricken by conscience when faced with the liquidation of a young mother played by Sherilyn Fenn. “Diary” features a brief appearance by Sharon Stone, who also does a wicked cameo in the otherwise pallid 1991 thriller “Where Sleeping Dogs Lie.”

The new juried Dame Judith Anderson Award went to the powerful 1990 Canadian film “The Quarrel.” Anderson, who died this year, was a longtime Santa Barbaran and local arts supporter.

Described as a “Jewish ‘My Dinner With Andre,’ ” “The Quarrel” features two long-lost Jewish friends--one now a rabbi and one a writer who has renounced his religion--who wander around a park in Montreal circa 1948 speaking eloquently about questions of morality and spiritual faith in the shadow of the Holocaust.

The festival’s Special Artistic Excellence Award went to Lars von Trier’s “Zentropa,” a technically over-the-top depiction of social confusion in postwar Germany. Huang Shuqin of China was named best director for “Woman Demon Human.”

Documentaries have long played a prominent role in the festival programming, and this year’s crop was diverse in form and content.

One of the most affecting was director-producer Debra Chasnoff’s “Deadly Deception,” which won an Oscar for best short documentary the day after it played at the festival. Chasnoff’s film details General Electric’s extensive history in the nuclear weapons industry.

Another documentary, “The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife,” pieced together a quirky indictment of apartheid in South Africa. In “Roger & Me” fashion, British director Nick Broomfield dogs an evasive racist leader and gives the subject enough rope to hang himself.

But the most unusual documentaries--and some of the most inventive cinema--were two of the four-hour films from Hungarian Peter Forgacs’ “Private Hungary” series. Using Hungarian home movies from the late ‘20s through the ‘50s as source material, Forgacs’ series weaves together a captivating chronicle of public and private experience. Each film focuses on a specific family saga, while also evoking a larger social and historical context through bits of narration and footage of the aftermath of World War II.

In fact, most of the festival’s finery came from afar. Notable West Coast premieres included the Canadian road trip “Highway 61” and the surreal Polish film “Escape From ‘Liberty’ Cinema.”

Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s “Proof,” a piquant portrait of a blind man’s rite-of-passage, was one of the festival’s highlights. British director Mike Newell’s latest, “Enchanted April,” and the Norwegian “Herman” were also films to watch for.

Turkish director Atif Yilmaz’ “Berdel” examined, with a subtle feminist scrutiny, sexist traditions amid rural life. From France came the eccentric romantic film “The Hairdresser’s Husband” and one of the most popular and bizarre entries of the festival, “Delicatessen,” a day in the life of a strange building.

One disappointment was the U.S. premiere of the prominent cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s directorial debut, “The Long Shadow,” a Hungarian-Israeli production starring Michael York and Liv Ullmann. Long on bathos and convoluted, the film failed to connect.

Impressive U.S. independent films included director Carl Franklin’s refreshingly twisted crime thriller “One False Move” and director Rocky Lang’s “Nervous Ticks,” a kind of real-time “After Hours”-esque maze of comic mishaps.