Chris Vognar

The Tulia Livestock Auction is a bustling community space for a Texas Panhandle town of approximately 5,000. But when a couple of California filmmakers showed up to do research for their documentary Tulia, Texas , they didn't quite fit into the scene.

"People thought we were PETA activists," laughs Kelly Whalen, sitting next to her filmmaking partner, Cassandra Herrman. "We were a curiosity."

Ms. Whalen and Ms. Herrman soon convinced the locals that no one's leather coat would be doused with paint. Their film is among the many glimpses of small-town Texas life on display at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival, which opens tonight and runs through April 6.

Headquartered in modern, streamlined Victory Park, sponsored by corporate heavy hitters including Target and American Airlines, AFI Dallas prides itself on being a sophisticated, urban affair. But its second annual installment offers the rare opportunity to explore small corners of the state that don't stand out as destination points.

"It's a continuation of a Texas theme that's gone on since The Last Picture Show and Giant," says AFI Dallas artistic director Michael Cain. "It doesn't have to be big to be dramatic. A lot of the time, the best stories come when you strip something down. A small town can be like a blank palette where the characters become the focus of the story. You have dreams sometimes coupled with the desire to leave. That can make for a great dynamic."

The dynamic can be great fun, as in Six Man, Texas, about six-man football in the South Plains and Central Texas.

But it can also be menacing.

Tulia, Texas, for instance, unravels the aftermath of the infamous 1999 drug sting that landed a good chunk of the town's black residents behind bars. All convictions were overturned, and the incarcerated were pardoned when lawyers exposed the crooked police work that went into the case. "What the film says about small towns is that we have to be really careful about how we deal with our justice system," says Freddie Brookins Sr., whose son was among those locked up. "Justice systems in a small town can be pretty crucial to minorities and poor people."

(Halle Berry, Billy Bob Thornton and director John Singleton are attached to a Hollywood version of the story, but Ms. Berry's pregnancy has put the project on hold.)

Meanwhile, on the fictional side, Cook County (not to be confused with the real Cooke County) tells the story of an East Texas family ripped apart by the methamphetamine epidemic that has corroded so many small towns. The film was shot in Dolan and Cleveland, Texas, where director David Pomes says meth is a daily fact of life.

"These kinds of places are usually made a little too cartoonish on TV and in the movies," says Mr. Pomes, who is from Houston. "We wanted to make it as real as possible. This story could take place in almost any small town these days. The meth problem was palpable while we were shooting."

Of course, small-town Texas isn't all about drugs and injustice.

Austin's David Modigliani, who directed the documentary Crawford, can relate to the welcome bestowed upon the Tulia chroniclers. He remembers the morning at the Fina station where he stopped to ask locals about the town's most famous part-time resident, President Bush.

"I walked in with three friends, and it was kind of like the needle went off the record," Mr. Modigliani says. "There were six guys around the table, and they all looked up at me as if to say, 'Who are you guys? What are you doing here?' "

The voices in the film, among the 700 or so residents of Crawford, include Ricky Smith, a horse-breaker and staunch Bush supporter who drops a racial slur; the affable Pastor Mike Murphy, who wears a SpongeBob tie; and Misti Tuberville, a history teacher who encourages her students to think for themselves.

As in so many small towns, everyone knows each other. Except in this small town, one guy is a bit more famous than everyone else. And he drew a lot of attention from fans and visiting foes, especially when Crawford became a symbolic battleground of the Iraq war.

"As a person who lived there, it could make you really crazy," Ms. Tuberville said in a recent interview. "There were all of these people inundating your town and joining in the politics and sometimes pretending they were part of the town, and you had no clue where they came from. But as a history teacher, it brought politics to life, and it made everything meaningful for the town and the students."

Small towns have long been cliché magnets, depositories for urban preconceptions. Ms. Herrman and Ms. Whalen, the Tulia directors, followed the drug sting coverage from afar before arriving in Texas. They expected to find a simple story of racism run amok.

They found the racism, but little was simple about the socioeconomic conditions that fuel the town's anxieties.

"I went in with preconceptions, but I found it much more challenging than I expected," Ms. Herrman says. "It wasn't so cut and dried. I had no experience with the economics of this place, and what's happened to this town over time with the demise of agriculture and farming. That affects everyone, and that has a lot to do with what happened there."

In other words, over several visits to Tulia, she came face to face with some of the town's realities. Not the negative stereotype of backwoods bigots, or the idealized fantasy of rural utopia. She found a real place with real problems rooted in real circumstances.

By the end of the festival you'll see a giant state's worth of small-town stories. And you won't even have to leave your big city.

1. At the Death House Door – From the makers of Hoop Dreams, a documentary about the chaplain who ministered to 95 people on the days of their executions in Huntsville. 3:30 p.m. Saturday; 10:15 p.m. Sunday, Magnolia

2. Crawford – Doc looks at what happens when a president takes up part-time residence in a town of 700. 7 p.m. Friday; 10 p.m. Saturday; 1 p.m. April 4, Magnolia

3. Cook County – Shot in the East Texas town of Cleveland, this drama looks at a father-and-son relationship ruptured by methamphetamine. Additional scenes were shot in Dolan, Texas. 10:15 p.m. Tuesday, Magnolia; 10:15 p.m. April 3, Angelika

4. North Starr – Drama about an aspiring Houston rapper navigating life in rural West Texas. 7 p.m. Monday; 10 p.m. Tuesday, Magnolia

5. Six Man, Texas – Doc about six-man football from Central Texas to the South Plains. 3:15 p.m. Saturday, Magnolia; 1:15 p.m. April 5, NorthPark

6. The Texas Show – The Dallas Video Festival's Lone Star showcase takes you all over the state. 1:30 p.m. April 6, Magnolia

7. Tulia, Texas – A look back at the infamous 1999 drug sting that further polarized a racially divided Panhandle town. 6:15 p.m. Saturday; 4 p.m. Sunday, Magnolia