BAMcinemaFest, With Jonathan Caouette and Others Movies are simultaneously getting bigger and smaller, more aggressively global and more stubbornly local. The season of "bigger" is certainly upon us now, as "The Avengers" and "Prometheus" prepare to make way for "Brave" and Spidey and Batman. But luckily, BAMcinemaFest opens its annual showcase of smaller movies on Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The festival, now in its fourth edition, manages to be both eclectic and coherent, and it also raises a question of terminology. "Small" is too belittling for work that often pursues large ambitions by necessarily modest means. But "independent film" is a phrase that has long since worn out its meaning and that now evokes, more than anything else, a fast-receding 1990s golden age of edge and quirk and irony. The Sundance-stamped indie brand may still exist, but a rising generation of autonomous North American filmmakers seems largely independent of that too. These writers and directors absorb influences from Iranian and Argentine cinema, from television sitcoms and avant-garde video, as well as from the new Hollywood and Off Hollywood canon of the 1970s. The results of their experimentation include highly personal, free-form narratives concocted with groups of like-minded friends, documentaries that are poetic as well as journalistic, and idiosyncratic reinventions of durable genres like the romantic comedy, the coming-of-age story and the road-trip buddy picture. Maybe we can find a label for all this activity among the cultural buzzwords of the moment. Post-mumblecore, locavore, Brooklyn, artisanal, occupy, Kickstarter, Lena Dunham - pick any two from that list and see what sticks. Seriously, though, if you are looking for evidence of (yet another) new American cinema, skeptical of Hollywood and critically engaged with the private and collective realities of contemporary life, Fort Greene should be your destination between now and July 1. Brooklyn is not Cannes. You will not necessarily find masterpieces of world cinema here, although last year's opener, Andrew Haigh's "Weekend," was about as close to perfect as a movie can be. And Benh Zeitlin's "Beasts of the Southern Wild," winner of an award on the Riviera last month and a pair of Sundance prizes back in January, will land at the academy ahead of its theatrical release next Wednesday. There will be more to say about "Beasts" at that point. It is worth noting here that, for all its marvelous uniqueness, the movie is representative of some of the best tendencies in the (see previous paragraph) school of (you know it when you see it) film. Fusing neorealism with magic realism, using nonprofessional actors and specific locations to create an almost mythical human and geographic landscape, addressing social concerns without piety or lecturing, Mr. Zeitlin and his co-writer, Lucy Alibar, have made a fresh, passionate and disarmingly sincere contribution to postmodern Americana. Shot in the bayous of southern Louisiana, "Beasts of the Southern Wild" is less a literal-minded exercise in regionalism than a fantastical essay on the notion of place. "Tchoupitoulas," by Bill Ross and Turner Ross, is more recognizably grounded in documentary conventions, but it shares a spirit of youthful adventure (as well as several producers and crew members) with Mr. Zeitlin's film. Following three brothers on a nighttime foray into New Orleans, the Ross brothers find surprising tones and affecting images in the blurry zone between artifice and observation. At a time when documentary skews toward advocacy and polemic, it is bracing to encounter such a vibrant commitment to color, noise and improvisation, to the communication not of points of view but rather of visions. A similar commitment can be found in "Walk Away Renée," Jonathan Caouette's sequel to "Tarnation," his astonishing video memoir from 2004. A heartfelt tribute to his mother, Renee LeBlanc, and an unflinching exploration of her mental illness, "Walk Away Renée" also updates Mr. Caouette's continuing growth from a troubled, talented boyhood into an adulthood marked by stability, sensitivity and continued artistic development - a life to some extent made, and saved, by filmmaking. Self-examination is a longstanding prerogative of youth, just as grumbling about the solipsism of the young is one of the vices of the middle-aged. In other words, there is a fair amount of navel-gazing to be found at BAMcinemaFest, and one person's art may be another person's lint. The opening-night film, Mike Birbiglia's "Sleepwalk With Me," adapted from a "This American Life" radio monologue, does not add much to the underachiever-in-crisis genre, in spite of Mr. Birbiglia's self-deprecating geniality. Playing an aspiring standup comedian with a sleep disorder and a much too tolerant girlfriend (Lauren Ambrose), Mr. Birbiglia dutifully negotiates the quarter-life crisis of a man striving to become interesting and almost succeeding. The characters in Jonathan Lisecki's "Gayby" undertake a similar effort with more ambiguous results. More interesting (at least from my admittedly middle-aged point of view) are films that combine honest self-questioning with formal restlessness and communicate a sense that much of the potential of this still young medium remains to be discovered. Craig Zobel's "Compliance," based on an actual incident, is at once an intensely disturbing report on the state of the American workplace and a queasy, exploitative allegory of abusive authority (including, perhaps, the power of a director to manipulate unsuspecting performers and spectators). The feeling you get from it, and also from Ry Russo-Young's "Nobody Walks," a prickly and unpredictable comedy (written by Ms. Russo-Young and, ahem, Lena Dunham) is that almost nothing is taken for granted, that new models of storytelling and expression are in the process of being invented. This energy makes up for some of the infelicities in this film, and also for the moments of awkwardness in "Welcome to Pine Hill," Keith Miller's story of a former drug dealer (Shannon Harper) at a difficult moment in his life. Mr. Harper plays a version of himself, and "Welcome to Pine Hill" originated in an encounter he and Mr. Miller had on a Brooklyn street, a meeting recreated in the movie's opening scene and charged with uncomfortable issues of race, class and masculinity. The film's final moments reveal a perhaps excessive debt to Ramin Bahrani's "Goodbye Solo," but it is motivated throughout by a humane and determined curiosity, an impulse to understand something about life that seems both obvious and mysterious. In other words, "Welcome to Pine Hill," like many of its companions at this festival, is a small film devoted to a very big idea. BAMcinemaFest 2012 opens on Wednesday and runs through July 1 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718) 636-4200 or bam.org.