YOU HAVE NO reason to type the words "Peter Scarlet" into your Google search engine, but if you did, you'd find references to his life as the driver of a furniture delivery truck, a bartender, and an encyclopedia editor. You'd also learn that for 19 years he was the artistic director of the San Francisco International Film Festival, building it from a provincial relic to an international destination.

I found some classic memories of Peter Scarlet's scary devotion to film out there in the ether: One critic recalled the moment he became an ardent Scarlet supporter – when the artistic director's "unmistakable voice" piped up authoritatively as some parent let his child cry through the time-stopping sequences of an Aleksandr Sokurov movie. Get that child out of here. The last time I saw Scarlet in person, he was headed into an extremely late night of partying alongside Iranian superstar Behrouz Vossoughi. He was running on fumes, but they were potent enough to get him across the bay, and eventually over the Atlantic, as he left last year to serve as general director of the Cinémathèque Française. Reports that circulated in the past few months said Scarlet was on a cinematic mission to Kabul.

There are 180 films in this year's San Francisco International Film Festival, but there's definitely something missing. It's not only Scarlet but his entire programming staff: Golden Gate Awards guru Brian Gordon (now executive director of the Nashville Independent Film Festival), Scarlet's hoped-for successor, Rachel Rosen (now programming director of the Los Angeles Film Festival), Doug Jones, and Mimi Brody (who both followed her there). Their absences were palpable at the press conference last month, when an all-new team announced this year's titles. It felt like a morgue.

But the mood soon lifted. As B. Ruby Rich reports on page 32, the festival's new staff, Linda Blackaby, Carl Spence, and guest programmer Roger Garcia, quickly made some incredibly savvy choices – among them, coming up with Fernando Birri, a Latin American cinepoet and activist from the old school, as its "Persistence of Vision" awardee. "This is a filmmaker so principled, so important, and so underrecognized," Rich writes, "that no festival honoring him could possibly find its virtue impugned."

Feel free to be the judge of that. We invite you to meander through two weeks of programs and 58 critics' previews in our 14 pages of film festival coverage and to figure out the all-new S.F. International Film Festival for yourself.