AMID ALL OF 2004's blockbusters and animated toy tie-in bait lurked an entire class of exceptional films that required effort (and occasionally even international travel) to see. Local filmmakers and writers share their thoughts on the best films that might not be coming soon to a theater near you – but they should be.

Susan Gerhard

Bay Guardian contributor

Big City Dick: Richard Peterson's First Movie (Scott Milam, Todd Pottinger, and Ken Harder, USA) Just when it seems the documentary genre has exhausted the outsider artist phenom, the professional fan phenom, and the almost famous phenom, comes along a film 10 years in the making that breaks all records in both the humor and heartstrings departments. Those who know the Richard Peterson oeuvre, or legend, should storm the gates and get this out to everyone else; it's a genuinely warm and fascinating look at Johnny Mathis's number-one fan, the genius behind "Love on a Golf Course."

The Green Hat (Liu Fendou, China) Movie-smart self-consciousness meets actual consciousness in a plot that revolves around male impotence and takes a hostage or two along the way. You haven't seen this movie, a feature debut by the scriptwriter for the inferior but still worthy Shower, and you may never see this movie if it doesn't find a distributor, but its surprise opening is so good that I still don't want to give any more of it away to you.

Rock School (Don Argott, USA) I hate to go Amazon.com on you, but if you liked School of Rock, you'll love this film, which actually documents the Philadelphia-area after-school program that trains otherwise normal adolescents to be outrageously strange Frank Zappalikes, complete with the Jack Black prototype as "prof."

Kevin Y. Kim

Bay Guardian contributor

Repatriation (Songhwan) (Kim Dong-won, Korea) Walking beside Kim Dong-won's jerky handheld cam, an unnamed, middle-aged Korean conveys a metaphor for Kim's entire project (apropos too to future Korean reunification after 50 years of war and millions lost). "It may be really difficult for two people to cross the line separating them," she says, implying both the North-South divide and her Southern support group's interactions with several Northern ex-spies, Kim's principal subjects, captured before their mission began and now aged to harmlessness after years in prison. "But you don't always have to ... as long as you basically think the same way. It may take time, but you can [weave] a beautiful pattern out of mutual trust. No need to worry about the line." Highly self-conscious of the politicized conditions of its making, Kim's sprawling, stunning documentary, filmed over 12 years, paints poignant portraits that collapse the distance between hoary elders released after refusing for decades to "convert" and others beaten into renouncing their home by repressive Southern regimes. Some opt for repatriation with improving inter-Korean relations, some stay and marry, and many die alone and broke. All have their laughs, cries, and curses woven into a loose, formless film plumbing past ideology to the human hearts beating at its center. A modest hit overseas and a Sundance Film Festival winner, Repatriation isn't the progressive veteran's tightest doc at 149 minutes but offers a heartrending, if imperfect, translation of words and feelings across lines only as profound as our capacity for empathy.

Jon Moritsugu

Director, Fame Whore

Up for Grabs (Mike Wranovics, USA) A feature-length documentary that shows, yes, even non-sportin' fans can thoroughly get sucked into the sheer psychodrama about one slippery ball and two lusty men.

Scumrock (Jon Moritsugu, USA) In which a pretentious underground filmmaker struggles with his masterpiece while a scuzzy punkoid chick tries to keep her band from fading into obscurity. Totally award-winning and, as of 2004, still undistributed.

Caveh Zahedi

Director, In the Bathtub of the World

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand) My favorite undistributed film from 2004 was Tropical Malady, the Thai film that won the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The film screened at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as part of a retrospective of the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who had been invited there as an artist in residence. I had heard great things about the film from Joel Shepherd, Yerba Buena Center's film curator, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw that night. To say the film is a brilliant masterpiece doesn't do justice to the originality and strangeness of this utterly unique voice in the contemporary cinematic landscape. The film could probably best be likened to the work of Tarkovsky, mixed with a little Hou Hsiao-hsien, but something startlingly new has been born, which suggests entirely new directions for the art of cinema. The film manages to express inner states to a degree that's almost inconceivable. Kant defined the sublime as that which is beyond the mind's ability to encompass, and that's certainly the case here. The good news is that this paradigm-altering film has been picked up for distribution (thanks to Strand Releasing) and will be playing in select theaters sometime in 2005.

Chuck Stephens

Bay Guardian contributor

6horts (Amir Muhammad, Malaysia) The next filmmaker everyone will be talking about, from the next Southeast Asian cinema every festival programmer will be claiming to have discovered, is Malaysia's Amir Muhammad, a 32-year-old Muslim with a degree in law who bought a book of film critic Philip Lopate's flowery essays while on a day trip to Singapore a few years ago and, a bus ride later, decided to reinvent himself as the Muslim world's funniest film essayist. 6horts (available on VCD at 6horts.tripod.com) compiles Muhammad's first forays into short-form satire, low-tech trenchancy, and occasional sensuality: in "Friday," an only slightly subversive meditation on weekly worship pauses to express concern about shoe theft at the mosque during prayers, while "Pangyau," narrated in Malay and subtitled in English, concerns its narrator's attempts to learn Cantonese in order to get closer to a Chinese boy he once had a crush on – though its real subject is the way the filmmaker masterfully segues from describing a blow job in an American porn flick to remembering the first time he tasted pork: "I took it in slowly – I thought I might gag." The freshest voice in Islamic filmdom, Muhammad – along with Kuala Lumpur friends and collaborators like James Lee and Ho Yuhang – isn't just reinventing long-moribund Malaysian cinema; he's giving long overdue voice – no, make that "voices" – to Malaysia's riotous, and sometimes riotously funny, multiethnic megamix.