It was here, at a Montreal Film Festival party years ago, that director Brian De Palma peered across the floor and narrowed in on leggy Angie Dickinson. "Do you know what I want to do with that woman?" he asked those seated at his table.

"What?" they all gulped.

"Make a movie with her," said De Palma, rising to converse with Dickinson. The rest is history: 1980’s Dressed To Kill.

It was here that I saw the immortal star of La strada, Giulietta Masina (Signora Federico Fellini), and, awed, got her autograph.

I feel I’ve been going forever to the Montreal World Film Festival, which this year, from August 22 to September 2, celebrated its 26th anniversary. I’ve had amazing interviews with such guests as the late Ginger Rogers and the late Toshiro Mifune. This year at a dinner, I asked the festival’s one-and-only director, Serge Losique, to think back to the earliest years, and he quickly began to reminisce about Sunset Boulevard star Gloria Swanson, an avid vegetarian: "She cost us only five dollars a day. All she ate was lettuce!" Howard Hawks came to Montreal shortly before his 1977 death to meet Losique’s pal Jean-Luc Godard, who so admired Hawks’s films.

It was at Montreal that, in the ’80s, Godard presented the cryptic lectures that became the basis of his fascinating 1989 essay movie, Histoire(s) du cinema. He was scheduled to deliver talks at his year’s fest but phoned in sick from his home in Switzerland. "It’s nothing serious. Godard is very exhausted," Losique explained. Instead, we made do with a megastar visit from Robert De Niro, whom Losique introduced at a screening of City by the Sea as "the greatest actor in America."

At a squashed press conference afterward, De Niro plugged this new film, which opened last week. As you may have heard, Bobby D. isn’t much of an ad-libber. The movie was "emotionally draining in certain scenes," and, after September 11 in NYC, "things are getting back to normal." He likes film festivals. He likes Montreal. Would he do some dialogue from Taxi Driver? "No." Is he talking to us? Not much. "De Niro comes often to Montreal because of our beautiful women," a female Air Canada employee confided to me at the Dorval airport.

The sole Boston-area film at Montreal, Cambridge documentarian Gayle Ferraro’s Anonymously Yours, is a mixed viewing experience. It wows with its tales of woe and horror from the mouths of Burmese prostitutes in rural Thailand, and these women and Ferraro and her cameraperson, Jill Tufts, are to be commended for their dangerous collaboration — Ferraro and Tufts (both have BU degrees) could have been killed. And who can imagine the possible fate of the poor Burmese women who offered their stories to a camera crew? But Ferraro miscued in placing lots of second-unit footage between the interviews, padding a major short film into a stretched-out feature.

Two other documentaries were fantastic. Deirdre Lynch’s Photos To Send shows the New Hampshire filmmaker traveling through rural County Clare, where she locates and interviews the still-surviving people who appeared in Dorothea Lange’s famous 1954 photographs of the region. Their stories are vivid, magnificent ones, crusty and winningly sentimental, not far from John Ford’s Quiet Man country.

See What Happens: The Story of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus was made by Gerold Hofmann for European television, and it’s a touching, informative homage to America’s foremost documentary couple. This husband and wife have made nonfiction films together since the 1970s, including The War Room and Down from the Mountain. Hofmann shows them at home and in the editing room and walking their dogs through Central Park, and he frames them in Manhattan exteriors so they look like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.

Montreal’s biggest crowd pleaser? Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence, an emotionally stirring period piece (1930s) from Down Under in which three "half-caste" children escape the training school for servants where they’ve been sent and attempt to return to their Aboriginal mothers. (Rabbit-Proof Fence is also a Boston Film Festival entry; Peg Aloi’s review is on page 3.) Noyce brought along his Aboriginal teen star, Everlyn Sampi, who celebrated her first time out of Australia by wearing dark shades, signing autographs, and racing happily around a shopping mall. "She says she’s 14," Noyce told me. "I’ve seen her passport. She’s 13."

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