NEW YORK - With too many films you see them and forget them almost before you hit the parking lot. And then there are those precious few that stay with you, keep coming back to you weeks, and years later. The Innocents is just such a movie.

The first feature film by Katherine Griffin, The Innocents had its international debut at the Cannes Film Festival this week. It’s a "small" picture budget-wise but it’s a sign of big things to come for Griffin, its star, writer, director, producer, editor and actor.

With a passion for movies that is refreshing in a world of sequels, remakes and ideas stolen-from-a-lame-TV-sitcom, Griffin lived in her car for eight months and held down three waitressing jobs to save up the money for The Innocents. "I’d do it all over again if I had to," she told the Los Angeles Times.

The Innocents is the story of two high school seniors in a small Indiana town in 1961. Jane (Kama Lee) is the local overachiever whose classmates resent her because of it. She’s the class valedictorian looking forward to going to Radcliffe and becoming a writer. Maggie (Griffin) is a farm girl with a touch of the devil in her. She lives with her abusive father and can’t see a future beyond her property line.

Both isolated in their own way, the girls form a bond during the summer after high school. They uncover a diary of Jane’s mother describing a love affair she had with a young Black man in the early 1940s. Maggie and Jane decide to go in search of answers about this "illicit" romance. Along the way they discover as much about themselves as about Jane’s mother. What they learn opens both girls’ eyes to unseen possibilities for the future.

The interracial aspect of the story was introduced matter of factly, without controversy, more like kids today approach relationships rather than in the 1960s. And yet, as someone who graduated from high school in Indiana in 1968, I know that it's completely believable that a young woman who followed the rules for 18 years could be suddenly ready to take risks and embark on adulthood free of old rules, ready for anything.

Although James Toback's Black and White, in theaters now, claims to be a film that arouses impassioned debate about race relations, The Innocents has much more to say because it doesn’t try to be provocative. I asked Griffin what made her want to address the question, especially when filmmakers and television producers - who, unlike Griffin, have money to do what they want - are content to continue to present a world where non-white means non-existent?

"My approach to this very delicate subject was to make it purposefully understated in comparison to what is typically seen in movies today," she said, five minutes before racing to the airport for her flight to Cannes. "I didn't want for there to be any predisposition on anyone's part, save possibly for the audience. I wanted it to be a fresh view on how things could have been and may still be."

Although it is Jane’s story that drives the film, Maggie is the one who keeps coming back to me. Poverty, or the low expectations of others for you, seeing no way out - all these can tragically keep a young woman from exploring who she is and what she wants out of life. As a mother of a 12-year-old girl, this is particularly scary for me. I want my daughter to know that she never has to settle, that anything and everything is possible, and that she shouldn't rush to choose or allow herself to be trapped. Maggie is someone you hold your breath for, hoping she can break free. You want so much more for her than is offered to her up to now.

"For me personally, Jane and Maggie represent two sides of myself;" Griffin told me, "counterparts that play off each other. On a broader scale, they represent a duality in the way young women are raised and the confines they can have built for them depending on circumstance." "Maggie was the more difficult character to write," Griffin said. "I think for exactly the reason you mentioned - she takes so long to change, to let go, whereas Jane begins her transformation from the moment she and Maggie become friends."

I saw The Innocents at its New York premiere in February. I thought it was a nice job then. Little did I know that it would still be pricking my brain - and making me smile - today.