It's time for prime viewing

N.H. festival has 60-plus films and many workshops

If you're looking for an excuse to head out for some leaf-peeping, consider a swing along the coast north of Boston. That's where you'll also find the New Hampshire Film Festival, which opens on Thursday for its eighth annual outing.

The event settles in for four days in the seaport city of Portsmouth, with screenings, workshops, and parties at 10 venues around town, including The Music Hall, Connie Bean Community Center, and Muddy River Smokehouse.

Festival curators say they reviewed more than 600 movies to come up with the 60-plus on exhibit. There's director John Boorman's "The Tiger's Tail," starring Brendan Gleeson as a man who becomes spooked after he spots his doppelganger on the streets of Dublin (Friday at 6:05 p.m. and next Sunday at 12:15 p.m.). There's "August," about the hedonism and smoke-and-mirrors audacity of Internet entrepreneurs circa 2001, starring Josh Hartnett and Rip Torn, with a cameo by David Bowie (Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 10:25 a.m.).

Brad Anderson's thriller "Transsiberian," with Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, and Ben Kingsley, has been making its way around the film festival circuit this year and it headlines this event, playing on Friday at 8:25 p.m. after a 7:30 p.m. reception and opening ceremony. It also plays Saturday at 12:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:25 p.m.

A workshop on "Working in the Film Business in New England" will be led by Mark Constance, a director's assistant on three-dozen movies including "Charlie's Angels" and "Being John Malkovich." He'll be joined next Sunday at noon by Sophie Carlhian (art director on "Next Stop Wonderland"), Scott Davis (gaffer on "Gone Baby Gone"), Virginia Johnson (costume supervisor on "The Women"), and Greg Smith (assistant director, "Little Miss Sunshine").

There are also workshops on working with the New Hampshire film office and how to best use a short film as a calling card. The full schedule is online at www.nhfilmfestival.com. To reach the box office, call 603-436-2400.

CONVERSATIONS WITH: If you liked Hedwig, you may like Océan LeRoy: LeRoy is a French drag king based in Berlin and the ultimate flip-flopper, shifting onstage between female and male personas, sometimes wearing a costume that is female on the left, male on the right. The CineMental series is celebrating two years of bringing queer cinema to the Brattle Theatre with a live performance by LeRoy on Tuesday at 9 p.m., a screening of Saskia Heyden's 2007 documentary about LeRoy and the drag king scene, "Risk, Stretch, or Die," and a post-film Q&A. LeRoy will also be at the Brattle on Wednesday for a 10:45 p.m. show and Q&A, but without the live performance. Details are at www.truthserum.org.

Brookline's Alex Freeman will be presenting his short film "The Raven" on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Freeman, who has cerebral palsy, has been working on the film for a year with the Brookline-based nonprofit No Limits Media.

In a press release, Freeman says, "I wanted to be a filmmaker because it's my way of communicating with people intimately - letting people know who I am, who I was, and what I wanted to say through my films - even if the standard way of communicating through speaking did not always play in my favor." He says he was drawn to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" because "it's the story of losing a loved one - in this case, my own control and my own body."

No Limits Media is working on a film about its work with Freeman. A preview of "Alex's P.O.V." will also play at the Coolidge event. Read more at www.nolimitsmedia.org (617-734-2500 and www.coolidge.org).

SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The second Boston Muslim Film Festival will show seven movies this year including the Egyptian film "Dunia," Jocelyne Saab's drama about a poet and dancer who is the victim of female genital mutilation. That's Friday at Northeastern University's Cabral Center at 6:30 p.m. Other venues include the Brattle Theatre and the Boston Public Library. All films will be accompanied by live performances, and all events are free (www.muslimfilm.org).

The annual collection of "British Advertising Films" - yes, 86 minutes of television ads and public service announcements - comes to the MFA for 11 shows. It plays Wednesday at 8:30 p.m., Thursday at 5:45 p.m., Saturday at 5:45 p.m., and additional dates through Nov. 2.

The provocatively titled "Sex, Okra and Salted Butter," which the Harvard Film Archive says is "reminiscent of the Stephen Frears/Hanif Kureishi collaborations of the 1980s" about the ways people can blossom when they move outside their cultures, plays the HFA on Friday at 7 p.m. Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun was awarded the 2008 Genevieve McMillan and Reba Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking by the HFA last April, and five of his films will be shown over the weekend (617-495-4700 and hcl.harvard.edu/hfa).

And all comers are invited to bring-your-own-film to Home Movie Day at the HFA on Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. The afternoon is part of an international happening sponsored by the Los Angeles nonprofit The Center for Home Movies. To be included in the show, audience members are invited to show up at noon with super 8, 8mm, or 16mm film, or VHS or DVD video. As director John Waters says, "Home Movie Day is an orgy of self-discovery, a chance for family memories to suddenly become show business." Tons of information is at www.homemovieday.com.

Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com.