San Francisco is lucky enough to be awash in specialized film festivals. A stretch of them nearly covers February to April, with just a little breathing room after each one.

Wrapping up last weekend was the SF Independent Film Festival, whose initials are not to be confused with the city's largest festival, the SF International Film Festival, which dwarfs all others. For 10 days the SF Indie Fest concentrates on the fringe that's often overlooked by larger festivals, and like a cool little museum it's small enough that you can feasibly see everything it offers. I didn't, but I did catch 15 or so programs.

Here are my favorites:

• Revengers Tragedy — Somehow I've made it this far without seeing Repo Man, and although I've seen Sid and Nancy, it was so long ago that I don't remember it very well. So I walked into Alex Cox's latest with few preconceived notions. For a while I thought it was nothing I hadn't seen before: a modern, punkified updating of a centuries-old play (Thomas Middleton instead of Shakespeare, but still). However, it won me over. The double-crossers are expertly cast, their double-crossings are swift, and Cox finds humor without using rim shots. Not that he's subtle at all. For example, Eddie Izzard, who we see crammed into the back of a limo with his brothers throughout the movie, discovers the fold-down armrest once his brothers have been bumped off. Or, Christopher Eccleston orchestrates the briefest frame-up I've ever seen: he tells the police, "That one killed them two," and that's that. Leave the sentiment at the door.
• Nobody Needs to Know — One of the joys of a festival like this is stumbling across something that you really can't imagine seeing anywhere else. Azazel Jacobs' movie is annoying and alienating. It has an odd idea of a narrator, separate from the story, who comments on nearly every scene, as if he's watching along with you. And yet the story beneath this overbearing presence is so cleverly told, and the ideas explored so subtly (perplexing, this subtlety beneath something so self-conscious), that I found myself thinking about it for a long time after I saw it. I believe the movie has a lot to say about what it means to participate in society and how odd it is that so many people value, or seem to value, not participating, adorning themselves with the look and the surface attitude of the drop-out. Also, I think it's good to remember that a movie doesn't need to be a masterpiece to be thought-provoking. I hope Jacobs gets to make more features in the future.
• Piggie — I had a similar feeling about Alison Bagnall's character-driven debut feature. (She previously cowrote Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66.) This story shot on video revolves around two people: Fanny, a teen girl played by Savannah Haske (also the movie's cowriter), and Nile, a guy evading a bit of trouble by drifting into Fanny's rural town. They meet, which means more to her than it does him. They're fascinating because they both have unclear motives that seem to involve manipulating each other with different ends in sight. Fanny's got her mind on romance and makes up country songs that she sings a capella into a tape recorder. Nile, on the other hand, is too old for Fanny and sees trouble down that road, but he has some cash flow problems, and people are pursuing him. The movie tries to wrap things up with a poignant ending, but for a while it feels alive, even suspenseful because of the volatility of its characters rather than any predetermined story arc.
• 2LDK — Yukihiko Tsutsumi and Ryuhei Kitamura challenged each other to a cinematic duel: each of them was to shoot a movie in a week about two characters dueling in a single location to the death. For his entry Kitamura made Aragami, a traditional supernatural sword fighting movie. But Tsutsumi made 2LDK, a funny and original falling out between roommates. Two young women have auditioned for the same part in a yakuza movie. Tomorrow they'll find out who gets it, but tonight they have to share an apartment. Let's just say they don't hit it off and things escalate like an extended, live-action episode of Itchy & Scratchy. Except for providing a few tips on using household items for nefarious purposes, 2LDK has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and I quite enjoyed it. The colorful apartment is generously trashed, and the girls' rage is nothing that hasn't gone through a roommate's head at one time or another, although maybe most of these fantasies don't involve so many deadly blows to the skull.

The next festival in San Francisco is the SF International Asian-American Festival, which I'm really looking forward to, not only because they have a lot of great stuff on the schedule (can't see everything at this fest), but also because I believe they'll be showing several movies that Miramax has snatched up for US distribution and subsequently shelved.