Ireland’s David Elio Malocco discovered the Woods Hole Film Festival on the Web, a small American fest championing independent works, so he mailed a tape of his feature, Virgin Cowboys. Any chance for the North American premiere? He’d come with his film, even if the fest couldn’t pay his way across the Atlantic. It was the ideal offer for Woods Hole, in its 11th shoestring, all-volunteer year, especially since Virgin Cowboys proved an adept, genre-savvy heist film. Malocco arrived at the Cape for the July 30 screening, at which the audience got off on the motley cast of burly scoundrels. He stayed all week, attending seminars and other filmmakers’ screenings and making himself available. A perfect film-festival guest.

On the other hand . . .

The middle-aged crowd lining up for Made-Up, Woods Hole’s closing-night film on August 3, was kept waiting in a hallway for more than half an hour because the film’s director, Tony Shalhoub, and producer, Lynne Adams, felt that there was too much blue on the screen when their DV film was projected. Thus began a long night of out-in-the-open grumbling that this showing of the Jamaica Plain–shot feature was being ruined by the unprofessional Woods Hole crew. I witnessed Lynne Adams chewing someone out because the picture was too dark. At the end, the Made-Up people bolted for their Martha’s Vineyard ferry without thanking anyone from the fest.

The audience, of course, didn’t give a darn about the brouhaha. It was jubilant to have a couple of film personalities in attendance, Shalhoub and his wife, Brooke Adams, the movie’s lead; and it was with the story all the way, guffawing at the corniest jokes and reveling at the obvious plot twists. I can understand film artists wanting their movie shown in the best technical circumstances, but Made-Up isn’t exactly The Rules of the Game. It’s an opened-up version of Lynne Adams’s middlebrow stage play about a 40ish woman whose daughter wants to be a cosmetologist instead of going to college and wants to practice her makeover art on her graying mom. There’s a reason that Made-Up hasn’t found a distributor: it’s community-theater square.

Fortunately, the Woods Hole Fest had other made-in-Massachusetts indies on its well-chosen 2002 program:

"The Book and the Rose." A 29-minute narrative by Springfield’s Jeff Bemiss, set in 1942 and with dazzling production values, about the epistolary romance of a draftee and the mystery woman he has discovered through her notes in a used copy of Anna Karenina. Hollywood should come scrambling.

The Gift of the Game. A warm, vastly entertaining, boys-of-summer documentary by Boston’s Bill Haney. Florida writer Randy Wayne White and some middle-aged guys, including screwball former major leaguers Bill Lee and Jon Warden, travel to Cuba to uncover the remnants of Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 ballclub and to bring bats, baseballs, and equipment to Cuban kids. The political message: "Castro sucks, the Cuban people are our amigos." Lots of funky baseball, plus Bill "Spaceman" Lee’s riff on metaphor in The Old Man and the Sea.

A Centered Universe. Former Bostonian Kaylyn Thornal’s gripping probe into the long life of the Dennis-based sculptor Harry Holl, now 80, who at key moments in his life rejected wives and daughters so that he could be free to work. "I want people to leave this movie not knowing if they like Harry or hate him," Thornal told me, and it’s this refusal to sentimentalize her charismatic subject that gives this nonfiction work its muscle.

Imagining Robert. Northampton’s Lawrence Hott made this stirring, troubling documentary about New York novelist Jay Neugeboren and his brother Robert, who has spent 38 years in mental institutions. At the time of the filming, Robert had at last been moved to a halfway house, where he is alternately endearing and hilarious, a Groucho with a beret and cigar, and an angry, belligerent mess. A must for the Boston Jewish Film Festival.

Water for the Moon. A dreamy, enchanting animation by Jamaica Plain’s Jenny McCracken about a woman who discovers a man in her closet. Very Eastern European puppetry, in classic black-and-white.

THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE’S summer "Actors A-Z" series finishes up this Saturday, August 10, with Torment (1944), the familiar tale of a repressive teacher at a private boys’ high school. You also get to watch Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg’s Fritz Langian expressionism duke it out with young Ingmar Bergman’s earnest, preachy screenplay. The "Z" is actress Mai Zetterling, who’s admirable as a battered, self-loathing floozy.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com