Within three short years, the Magnolia Film Festival, or as Festival Director Ron Tibbett calls it, "The Mag," has exploded. While it's still young, this comprehensive festival with an all-star lineup of fresh talent is running laps around other regional festivals. Selected from heaps of entries, The Mag has 24 films in competition. Collectively, these entries have won more then 75 national and international awards at other film venues - including prizes at Cannes, the Sundance Film Festival, the Sydney Film Festival, the Atlantic City Film Festival, and Cinequest, the San Jose Film Festival.

One of the feature films in competition this year is Katherine Griffin's The Innocents. Griffin lived in her beat-up car named "Honda" for eight months to save money for her first feature film. It's an adorably quaint small-town film with plenty of upscale sophistication and homespun charm. Set in rural Indiana in 1961, this is a story of commencement. Jane, a bookish recluse anxious to enter Radcliff and escape the narrow minded barriers of a small town, and Maggie, a salt-of-the-earth farm girl, discover family secrets and true friendship the summer after their high school graduation.

When the girls borrow the truck and take to the road, the film transforms from a nostalgic rumination into a vibrant folktale. Griffin effectively captures the eccentricities of small town life in the heartland of America with a rich, robust vision rarely demonstrated in a first feature film. Griffin represents a strong movement in the indie filmmaking scene. Like Sundance, held in Utah this past January, The Mag can boast a relatively high percentage of female participants. Tibbett estimates that approximately 30% of the films this year are from women helmers.