E-Mail This Article to a Friend Here and there The IFFB, a lost script by Krzysztof Kieslowski, and more BY GERALD PEARY

It was a heartening sight: at the beginning of May, lines down the block at the Somerville Theatre for the second Independent Film Festival of Boston. Likewise at the Brattle and Coolidge. Yes, this year the fest really kicked in, with A-list sponsors (Jet Blue Airways, the Marriott Boston Copley Place, etc.), plenty of screenings selling out, and young, excited audiences eager to converse with the many, many filmmakers in attendance. It’s thrilling that Beantown is finally getting the kind of inventive, spirited, democratic festival it deserves, and both the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe backed the IFFB with glowing in-depth stories.

How good were the films? Programmer Adam Roffman supplied me with a list of what he considered the best works, but I defied him (an experiment) by choosing to see two other pictures. Matt Mahurin’s I Like Killing Flies proved a delightful visit with impossibly cranky New York diner owner Kenny Shopsin, whose cuisine is a Calvin Trillin favorite. Barak Goodman’s The Fight, which re-creates the 1938 heavyweight rematch between African-American Joe Louis and Germany’s Max Schmeling, is one of the finest, deepest American Experience documentaries ever; it’ll show this fall on PBS.

MIRACLES ABOUND in the films of the Polish master filmmaker, Krzysztof Kieslowski, especially in his Three Colors trilogy. And here’s a bona fide miracle after his untimely 1996 death: a sequestered screenplay, The Big Animal, was found tucked away in a file drawer by a friend, Elzbieta Scotti, who turned it over to Kieslowski’s widow. A 1970s remnant of Communist Poland, it’s been brought to the screen — it’ll be at the Brattle Theatre this weekend, May 21 through 23 — with tenderness and restraint, and as a homage to the late director, by Kieslowski’s long-time lead actor (Camera Buff, The Decalogue, White, etc.), Jerzy Stuhr. Directed by and starring Stuhr, The Big Animal is Theatre of the Absurd–sweet (Ionesco?) by way of a 1940s James Thurber New Yorker cartoon.

Middle-aged and paunchy, Stuhr plays a small-town Polish bank clerk, Zygmunt Sawicki, who lives a sedate life with his wife, Marysia (Anna Dymna). One night as they slurp soup at their dinner table before a picture window, a strange creature peers in on their meal: an abandoned camel. The audience knows that it was left behind by a traveling circus, but to the Sawickis, the orphan camel is an unexplained blessing. Quickly, the amiable, two-humped visitor becomes Zygmunt’s companion. He takes great pride in walking his camel through the village and showing it off to the town’s children.

Such an idyllic existence can’t last. Kieslowski uses his almost-fairy tale to critique Eastern European provincialism and the sluggish, ignorant local bureaucracy. (Set in no particular time, the film has an archaic feel, suggesting bygone Communist days.) The camel is resented as "The Other"; there are paranoid fears that it may be bringing in "African Aids." The people in charge want to tax the camel, to exploit it for tourist purposes, ultimately to drive it away.

Has Kieslowski implied a religious theme? Is there (think Robert Bresson’s infinitely harsher Au hasard Balthazar) something Christ-like about the very gentle camel, who is pelted with apples by the impious citizenry? The Big Animal skirts close to allegory, yet it’s too modest to be defined in a very symbolic way. More to the point is Kieslowski’s humanism: the sweetness of Zygmunt strolling along with his benign, cud-chewing, super-sized pet.

THE SHRINKING of Super Size Me? Someone connected to the anti-fast-food documentary had an attack of cowardice, for the initial gross-out moment in the movie, when filmmaker Morgan Spurlock submits on-camera to a doctor’s rectal exam, has been mucked with in the Goldwyn release print. The agonizing seconds in which the rubber glove is up Spurlock’s bum have been much trimmed, and worse, there’s now a black screen on the frame covering up his anal passage. I was there: I witnessed the bare-assed director’s cut at the South by Southwest Film Festival.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . . "Today we are dealing with an audience that is primarily under 25 and divorced from the literary tradition. They prefer mindless violence to solid plotting; four-letter words to intelligent dialogue; pectoral development to character development. Nobody listens any more. They just sit there, y’know, waiting to be assaulted by a series of shocks and sensations." That was filmmaker Billy Wilder 40 years ago, as recorded by Maurice Zolotow in Billy Wilder in Hollywood.