In its sixth year, the Newport International Film Festival, however classy its program, is still held back by spotty attendance. How to get Rhode Islanders off their yachts and out of their bed & breakfasts and into the movie theaters — that’s been the issue since 1998. "Oh, is there a film festival in town?" diffident Newporters kept asking whenever someone passed wearing a festival badge or T-shirt. Exasperating!

There was a fest, June 10 through 15, and for those energetic enough to show up, Newport’s sixth film line-up was a deeply rewarding one. There’s probably no festival in North America that matches the caliber of non-fiction works each year in the Documentary Competition, and this summer’s crop of non-fiction features, including The Same River Twice, by Jamaica Plain’s Robb Moss, was, again, amazingly good. Maybe the Feature Competition lags a step behind, but there are always surprises and sleepers. This year, the discovery work was a film that premiered at Sundance two years ago but instantly disappeared: Rachel Perkins’s One Night the Moon, a poetic 57-minute Aussie Outback rock opera. It stars Paul Kelly, a dark-eyed Australian Dylan, as a mulish, racist farmer who rejects the help of an Aboriginal tracker when his little daughter disappears into the wilderness. Tragedy!

"The land is mine!" belts out Kelly’s territorial white man in song. "The land is me!" answers the eco-spirited Aborigine.

But let’s talk about several remarkable documentaries.

The Same River Twice (which has shown at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston) cuts between footage of the free-spirited 1970s — when the filmmaker, Moss, and his friends were blissfully naked river guides in the Edenic Southwest — and on-camera conversations with the same people today: married or divorced, with or without children, confronting the responsibilities of midlife adulthood. Clothed.

This sagacious, mature work from Moss, a Harvard filmmaking professor, is hardly "New Age," as a Boston Globe reviewer carelessly described it: there’s nary a word of pseudo-spiritual babble. Moss’s pals are wry, ironic, pragmatic. And it’s certainly not a Big Chill tale. Lawrence Kasdan’s film serves up lie-on-your-ass, screw-the-stupid-’60s defeatism. The Same River Twice, defiantly anti–Big Chill, is optimistically pro 1960s and 1970s and pro social activism. Kasdan’s movie has the good score; Moss’s people have the good core.

Is there no distributor with the courage to take on Carles Bosch & Josep Maria Domènech’s Balseros, an absolutely superb Spanish documentary (the best film of 2003?) that follows six Cuban boat people who, down and out in Castroland, rowed to America on makeshift rafts. A classic of cinéma-vérité, Balseros, without judgment or voiceover, looks what happens in the US to its protagonists over the next six years. Their tales are so poignant, so heartbreaking, and so astonishingly unexpected, as the six spread out over our great country chasing the American Dream. How do they do? The best is anointed Employee of the Month at Staples; the worst is a hapless hooker in Albuquerque. The most eerie: a man, virile and handsome in Cuba but now crippled and obese, who has found Jesus in a mission in southern Texas.

The Audience Award at Newport went to the astonishing Shelter Dogs, which mesmerized from first frame to last. "I search for subjects with ethical issues," filmmaker Cynthia Wade explained. She has a doozy with this one: a documentary portrait of controversial Sue Sternberg, who runs a non-profit shelter for stray and abandoned dogs in upstate New York, and who is as impassioned and as self-righteous about her cause as Captain Ahab. Maybe nobody on earth loves canines more than Sternberg, and most of the movie is a stirring, emotional, irresistible portrait of how she and her dedicated all-female staff bring lost, sick, hopeless, orphaned dogs back to life and health and prepare them for adoption.

The controversial part? Sternberg believes in, and practices, euthanasia on dogs she judges are hopeless. Most are deathly sick. But some are healthy animals that Sternberg intuits are, because of temperament and/or breeding, a physical threat to potential owners.

Is she right or wrong? Damned if I know. Several dogs are given lethal injections on screen in this unforgettable documentary commissioned for HBO. "We’re grateful," Wade said. "Who else would have the guts to air this but HBO?"

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