And the festival’s biggest star? L.A.

At a time when even the biggest movie stars are having a hard time tempting audiences into theaters, organizers of this year’s AFI Fest opted for banners simply inviting locals to “See a film.” Director of festivals Christian Gaines and newly appointed artistic director Rose Kuo are optimistic that the less-is-more approach will work thanks to the eclectic lineup they’ve assembled for the event.

World cinema and prestige pictures will share the spotlight with smaller projects set in and around Los Angeles -- the goal, festival architects say, is to appeal to a broad range of film lovers, from industry insiders to casual fans.

AFI Fest will unspool over the next 10 days at Hollywood’s ArcLight Cinemas and opens Thursday night with a gala screening of Robert Redford’s “Lions for Lambs,” featuring Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Redford in above-the-title roles. “Love in the Time of Cholera,” adapted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s landmark novel, will serve as the closing night film Nov. 11, with indie comedy “Juno,” about a young woman dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, screening Monday as the festival’s centerpiece.

Films set in Los Angeles -- covering an expanse of topics from the history of Hollywood to the way we live now -- appear throughout the festival. Among them, “Southland Tales,” an alternate-reality fable set amid the beaches and underpasses of L.A., will have its first hometown unveiling, while “Expired,” a bittersweet look at the love lives of L.A. traffic cops, boasts another deeply committed performance from Samantha Morton.

On the documentary side, there is “Hollywood Chinese,” Arthur Dong’s examination of the representation of Asians on film, as well as the short “Kids + Money,” photographer Lauren Greenfield’s look at the relationship local young people of varying economic strata have to their money.

Although many festivals divide their selections into such sections as “American Independent” or “International Spotlight,” the programmers behind this year’s AFI Fest grouped a healthy portion of the screenings under “World Cinema” in a nod to internationalization and globalization.

“It’s also an effort to avoid the bifurcation of the film industry,” said Kuo, who joined AFI Fest this year. “ ‘World Cinema’ includes ‘American Showcase.’ The idea is that films about L.A. are part of international cinema. International Cinema includes the entire world, which means America too. It’s not American films versus world cinema.”

The thread of Los Angeles-themed films emerged as programmers sorted through the roughly 4,300 submissions they received while winnowing their picks to the 147 films appearing in this year’s lineup.

“We always try to let the films pick the themes,” said Shaz Bennett, associate director of programming, “and there were just so many awesome movies that seemed to be about Hollywood and Los Angeles, from different points of view. So while they fit together, they are also all different. We almost didn’t think of it as a theme until we were finished programming.”

With so many festivals around the world scrambling to land premieres -- either world, North American, U.S. or Los Angeles -- AFI Fest organizers decided to focus instead on selecting films solely on their merits. The emphasis often placed upon bulk numbers of premieres is something Bennett refers to as “a racket that ultimately hurts both filmmakers and festivals.”

“We did make a conscious decision to shed preordained quotas this year,” explained Kuo. “We decided as a programming team, ‘Let’s try this another way.’ We watched all the films semi-blindly and then culled down and looked at where we ended up. Surprisingly, we ended up with a decent amount of premieres.”

The programmers are especially happy to trumpet the local premiere of “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project,” director John Landis’ documentary on the famed comedian, and the U.S. premieres of the independent drama “Chop Shop” and “Pop Skull,” a druggy horror variation.

Coming as it does in early November, AFI Fest often becomes a component in the larger campaigns for award hopefuls, and this year is certainly no different as films such as “The Savages,” “Margot at the Wedding” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” are all scheduled to make whistle-stops.

Among the international films that are screening, a number are the official selections of their countries for the foreign-language Oscar, including South Korea’s “Secret Sunshine,” Mexico’s “Silent Light,” Lebanon’s “Caramel,” France’s “Persepolis,” Austria’s “The Counterfeiter” and Romania’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.”

Other notable foreign-language films screening include Jacques Rivette’s “The Duchess of Langeais,” Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “The Flight of the Red Balloon,” Johnny To’s “Mad Detective” and Catherine Breillat’s “Last Mistress.” “We are both an overview of what happened the previous year and hopefully a forecaster of what’s to come,” said Kuo of AFI Fest’s position on the expanding festival circuit.

“The L.A. audience, I think, wants to participate in the dialogue of world cinema. In order to do that, we’ve got to bring the films they’ve been hearing about to Los Angeles, so they can join in the conversation.”

The Los Angeles Times is a presenting sponsor of AFI Fest.