Now in its fifth year, the Newport International Film Festival, which took place June 4 through 9, has kept a grip on its A-list of national sponsors: Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Mercedes-Benz. But donations fell after September 11. Fewer free tickets to movies or mansion parties floated about this year, and the sit-down clam-and-lobster feast of prior closing nights became a stand-up affair of chicken and shrimp pieces on a stick.

Fortunately, Newport 2002 stayed generous where it mattered, offering lodging for more filmmakers than ever before, including novice directors, who showed their shorts in five special programs. As always, the fest was a brilliant spot to discover feature documentaries, its selection more thoughtful than the publicized pickings at Sundance. Among the shiniest non-fictions were two Massachusetts works: Mai’s America, by Framingham’s Marlo Poras, and the jury prizewinner for Best Documentary, My Father, the Genius, by JP’s Lucia Small.

Of the fiction features, I enjoyed Don Boyd’s My Kingdom, a baroque, Liverpool-set modern-day King Lear starring Richard Harris as a white-maned gang leader with tarts for daughters, and Gabrielle Muccino’s The Last Kiss, a smart, modish Italian comedy about the pangs of unrequited love and the pains of adultery that should hit US theaters flying. I sampled American indies with buzz: Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger, Best Film at the Tribeca Film Festival, and Gary Winick’s Tadpole, a favorite at Sundance. What a contrast! Roger Dodger is edgy and cool, a discovery; Tadpole is lame, tame, sit-com dreck.

Back to the Hub, and Mai’s America. Somehow this remarkable documentary, which showed at the New England Film Festival, went unsung by the local press, though it won the Audience Award at South by Southwest and is playing at this year’s P-Town Film Fest and on PBS’s POV in August. I’m here to proclaim it among the best local films of the new century, this heartbreaking tale of one year in the life of a Vietnamese exchange student in America. Poras discovered Mai in Communist Hanoi and followed this effervescent, winningly optimistic girl back to the USA, where, expecting paradise, she got bogged down in rural Mississippi with a white-trash, TV-glued family of depressives. Thank Buddha for her surprise friends, a left-liberal history teacher and this Bible Belt town’s sole giddy transvestite.