Chris Vognar

James Faust walks into a room full of shelves lined with DVDs and videos. This is the inner sanctum of AFI-Dallas International Film Festival submissions, housed in a sprawling office space near the W Hotel. Each film is marked with a color dot. Festival staffers scurry about the office outside the sanctum.

"The orange dots are Texas films," explains Mr. Faust, the festival's head of programming. "The white dots are animation, green dots are student films, blue dots are documentary. Red dots are shorts. Yellow are narrative features. We're narrowing it down as we try to lock our schedule. Those are 'outs' over there on the wall."

"Outs" are films rejected by the inaugural festival, which runs March 22 through April 1 at venues including the Dallas Angelika, the Magnolia, the Nasher Sculpture Center and Southern Methodist University.

The outs form a very big pile. Then there's the red cabinet, home to the much smaller selection of lucky films that have been accepted. And the big question remains: What's in that red cabinet? Or, what is this festival, announced in September to much fanfare, going to show?

"It's a populist festival," says Michael Cain, the former head of the Deep Ellum Film Festival who runs the AFI fest with local marketing titan Liener Temerlin. Mr. Cain is a graduate of AFI, the Los Angeles film school that also holds an annual festival in LA; Mr. Temerlin came up with AFI's "100 Years ... 100 Movies" series. Mr. Cain is the artistic director, Mr. Temerlin the chairman of the board.

"It's not going to be something for everyone, but there will be something for people who like specific kinds of movies," Mr. Cain continues, sitting in his office. "The indie with the small 'i' will definitely be there. We'll have things the whole family can go to. Some of the things we're looking at are really edgy. We want to show films that change the status quo, movies that reveal things about the world that you might not know."

OK, so it sounds a little vague; the festival can't reveal titles until the schedule is locked in during the next couple of weeks. What we know is: There will be about 90 features, including narratives, documentaries and international films, and another 60 shorts. Mr. Cain and Mr. Faust will lead a contingent to Sundance this weekend to look at coveted films and hopefully close a deal or two.

So far, the festival has received 1,030 submissions and pursued another 170 films. "It's a little tiring," says a bleary-eyed Mr. Faust. "There are a lot of films to watch, and we want to make sure everybody gets a fair shot."

He's been watching five or six films every night, enough to give even a film critic a tired head.

Mr. Cain knows the AFI festival isn't Sundance or Cannes or Toronto. "We know it will take a year, or years, to create what it is we want it to be," he says. "We feel like we want the best event that we can create for Dallas."

As a certain president once said, it's hard work. A festival has countless moving parts, from housing guests and starting the films on time to figuring out what kind of event you want to produce.

According to one upper-echelon festival veteran, identity is key.

"You have to try to figure out who your audience is, and you need to understand who's coming," says Geoffrey Gilmore, director of the Sundance Film Festival, by phone. "Are you regional? Are you focusing on a niche in the community? Film festivals are anything but generic. They all have different agendas, and a lot of festivals don't understand how complicated those agendas are."

T-minus two months and counting.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com