Attendance at the Sacramento Japanese Film Festival has grown steadily, from 400 seats filled in its first year, 2005, to nearly triple that number last year.

Some of that is because the festival offers more films over more days. But the increase also testifies to festival organizers' programming skills.

The festival has perfected a mix of recent mainstream movies, gems from the past decade, classics such as "The Seven Samurai" (showing Sunday) and cross-cultural English-language films.

"Our fastest-growing audience segment is just film aficionados," said Barbara Kado, chair of the board for the Japanese Film Festival, put on by the Sacramento Japanese United Methodist Church. Some of these cinephiles are of Japanese ancestry, some not.

The festival starts tonight at the Crest Theatre with "Dear Doctor" – a Japanese Academy Award-winning film about a well-liked doctor keeping a secret from the village he serves – and runs through Sunday. Ten percent of proceeds from the event will go to Japan earthquake relief.

Film aficionados have flocked to the Japanese festival to see internationally recognized classics such as "Seven Samurai" make a rare big-screen appearance.

The 3 1/2-hour film is showing in response to audience requests, Kado said.

"We had hesitated because it is so long," Kado said. "But part of our mission is to show the best films available, within the limits of our time and resources."

So is showing films by "younger, emerging artists" such as Bay Area-raised writer-director Aaron Woolfolk and Canadian filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns, Kado said. Woolfolk's slow-build, cross-cultural drama "The Harimaya Bridge" plays Saturday night, and Stearns' documentary about his extended family, "One Big Hapa Family," shows Sunday afternoon.

"Harimaya Bridge" follows a grieving American father (Ben Guillory) to Japan, where his son, an English teacher and artist, was killed in a scooter accident. The father, intent on retrieving paintings his son gave to friends and co-workers, carries with him a lifelong resentment of Japan because of his own father's death in a prisoner-of-war camp.

"I wanted to make the story about different generations, and about reconciliation," Woolfolk, 42, said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he now lives. Woolfolk shot the film in San Francisco and in Japan's rural Kochi Prefecture, where he once worked as an English teacher.

The film's deliberate pace was meant to evoke 1950s Japanese films by Kurosawa and Yasijuro Ozu ("Tokyo Story"). Those films were "not afraid to take their time telling a story," said Woolfolk, who will appear alongside his film Saturday night. "The Western version (of 'The Harimaya Bridge') would be 15 minutes shorter."

Financed mostly by a Japanese studio and distributed theatrically in Japan, "Harimiya Bridge" features American movie star Danny Glover, who appears as the main character's brother. Glover also executive-produced the film.

Generational ties and the effects of World War II also factor into "One Big Hapa Family," a documentary exploring ethnic diversity within Stearns' extended Japanese Canadian family.

The film starts with a family reunion at which Stearns, 32, notices that his whole family, from his generation down, is of mixed ancestry.

"Hapa Family" shows how his family reflects the 95 percent rate of intermarriage among Japanese Canadians, tracing it back to the forced relocation during World War II of Japanese Canadians from the coast to the country's interior, where the population was predominantly Caucasian.

Forbidden from returning to Vancouver, B.C., after the war, many Japanese Canadians found farm work and married Caucasians.

"There was pressure in Canada to become more Canadian, because there was so much racism" just after the war, Stearns said, speaking by phone from Vancouver. Stearns' own family lived far enough inland to avoid internment, yet pressure to be "more Canadian" existed there as well.

The partly animated "Big Hapa Family" also chronicles other key factors – like love – that led to intermarriage in his family. The film celebrates his family's multiethnic identity and Japanese heritage.

Stearns is wary of using fractions when discussing ethnicity.

"We are not mathematical equations," Stearns said. "You are not half, you are not less than. You don't love your dad 50 percent of the time."

SACRAMENTO JAPANESE FILM FESTIVAL

When: Tonight-Sunday. Most films contain Japanese dialogue with English subtitles.

Where: Crest Theatre, 1013 K St., Sacramento

Cost: $10, or $30 for an all-event pass. Tickets available at the box office or through Tickets.com, (800) 225-2277.

Information: (916) 442-5189, www.sacjapanesefilmfestival.net

SCHEDULE

FRIDAY

8 p.m. "Dear Doctor": Winner of two Japanese Academy Awards, this movie follows a doctor keeping a secret from the village in which he is a beloved figure.

SATURDAY

• 1 p.m. "Still Walking": Director Hirokasu Kore'eda's character study follows two adult children on a visit to their parents' home.

• 3:30 p.m. "Tokyo Godfathers": Three homeless people – a teenage girl, an alcoholic man and an aging drag queen – discover an abandoned baby on Christmas Day. This 2003 film's sparkling, painterly animation shows that anime can reach past genre films.

• 7 p.m. "The Harimaya Bridge": A grieving American father with a lifelong hatred for Japan goes there to retrieve his late son's artwork and slowly develops an appreciation for the people he meets. In Japanese, with English subtitles and in English with Japanese subtitles.

SUNDAY

• 1 p.m. "One Big Hapa Family." Director and animator Jeff Chiba Stearns charts his family's place among an increasingly multiethnic Japanese Canadian population.

• 2:15 p.m. "Seven Samurai": Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film about samurai protecting farmers against bandits inspired every cinematic story about ragtag heroes to follow. (Screening includes an intermission.)

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Call The Bee's Carla Meyer, (916) 321-1118.

• Read more articles by Carla Meyer