The 26th Cleveland International Film Festival, which concluded Sunday night, didn't offer quite as many "buzzworthy" films as last year's program, which had the good fortune of including a certain backwards American independent (Memento) and a Mexican film (Amores Perros) that was nominated in Oscar's Best Foreign Language Film category just one week before the festival started (not to mention two more crowd-pleasers from overseas – In the Mood For Love and With a Friend Like Harry – that should have seen Oscar action). But that's not to say the 2002 edition of the festival didn't have plenty of diamonds in the rough waiting to be discovered by eager film geeks, even after Ernest & Bertram, an eight-minute short that outs Bert and Ernie, was yanked when the Sesame Street people caught wind of it.

One of the high points of last year's fest was Czech director Jan Svankmajer's Little Otik, a warped, Lynchian fairytale about an infertile woman who pretends a man-eating tree stump is her infant son, which provides a very nice segue into this year's How Harry Became a Tree, a film based on a Chinese fable, set in Ireland, directed by a Belgrade native and co-produced by Italy, France, Ireland and England. It's set in 1924, where a cabbage farmer (Colm Meany) has nightmares of becoming a tree and then being chopped down and made into coffins. Is he nuts, or will squirrels be storing nuts in him? Stay tuned for more details, which you'll only get if the film ever receives a distribution deal.

If Harry doesn't satiate your twisted desire for old Czech-interpreted folklore, then F.A. Brabec's Wild Flowers is guaranteed to do the trick. The film, which won the highly coveted Audience Award at Camerimage (an international cinematography festival), is based on a series of 19th century ballads written by Karl Jaromir Erben. There are seven beautifully filmed short segments here, each involving some kind of important moral that, I think, might correspond to the seven deadly sins, but in a much more family-friendly way than, say, David Fincher's Se7en. Also, the ballads rhyme when translated into English subtitles, which is just plain creepy.

Another film you'd be able to drag the kids to see is the uniquely animated Princes and Princesses, Frenchman Michel Ocelot's follow-up to the extremely well-received Kirikou and the Sorceress. His latest offers more of the same distinctive animation but divides itself into six separate sections set in a different time and place in history and, as the title suggests, contain either a prince, a princess, or both. The stories, which are completely unrelated to each other, are repetitive, like a children's book, and involve Egyptian fig trees, 19^th century Japanese coats and humans turning into ants. There's even a funny intermission about halfway through Princes that suggests the audience take "a one-minute break to talk things over."

If you're the kind of parent who enjoys intentionally introducing your kids to films which will cause loads of irreparable damage that years and years of costly analysis could never fix, I have just one word for you – Decasia. Bill Morrison's 70-minute experimental film is comprised of deteriorating stock footage set to Michael Gordon's eerie, droning score performed by Switzerland's Basel Sinfonetta. The ordinarily benign clips, which are ravaged by decay, are transformed into something sinister enough to drive dozens of people from the theatre with their hands over their ears.

As a whole, the dramatic festival films I enjoyed the most all seemed to come from Scandinavian countries, and my two favorites hailed from Sweden. Jalla! Jalla!, executive-produced by Together's Lukas Moodysson, is about the lives of two park groundskeepers. Måns is a beefy skinhead (without the issues) who is obsessed with his inability to get it up with his girlfriend, and Roro is a Lebanese transplant who is way too frightened to introduce his Swedish girlfriend to his family. Most of the action takes place around Roro's family and their devious plans to force him to marry a Lebanese girl he's never even met. Jalla! is full of some great physical comedy work from Torkel Petersson's Måns, and it's probably a little semi-autobiographical, as writer-director Josef Fares is Lebanese and moved to Sweden as a boy (his real-life brother and father play, respectively, Roro and Roro's dad).

Also hailing from Sweden is The New Country, which also depicts people who aren't native to the area. Co-written by the talented Moodysson, Country follows the travels of two illegal immigrants trying to become permanent residents. Ali is a 15-year-old Muslim-turned-Christian and aspiring 10k Olympic medalist from Somalia who claims to love Sweden, while Massoud is a 40-something, chain-smoking Iranian who merely sees it as an alternative to jail and/or death back home. It's a road-trip flick with a pair of unlikely stars, who eventually join up with a buxom blonde centerfold to accompany them on their journey through the countryside in a rusty car.

A little known fact in this country is that Norwegian director Pål Sletaune, who had a cult hit with Junk Mail back in 1997, was originally tapped to direct American Beauty but passed on it because he didn't feel the script was strong enough (d'oh!).His latest, You Really Got Me, is a dark comedy about two very different sad sacks: Jan runs a burger joint that gets about as much business as a non-alcoholic beer vendor, and Bent is the drummer in a popular rock band fronted by an egomaniac who won't ever let him forget he's riding his coattails.  Their paths cross via a very funny kidnapping.

There's a different kind of loser in The Icelandic Dream, but he's too optimistic to be lumped into the same category as Jan and Bent (a happy sack?). Imagine a younger, lazier (and thinner) version of Ralph Kramden, only obsessed with soccer (specifically Manchester United, which is weird considering he's a dead-ringer for striker Ruud van Nistelrooy), and you'd have Toti, whose latest get-rich-quick scheme involves selling black-market Bulgarian cigarettes in Reykjavík. And Denmark offers yet another Dogme-certified film with Kira's Reason: A Love Story.

Yes, there were American films screening in Cleveland, too, including the Luke Wilson/Denise Richards date-from-hell movie The Third Wheel, the dreary and excruciating pre-midlife crisis flick World Traveler with Billy Crudup and Julianne Moore, and two films that might turn up this fall in the ImageOut festival – The Business of Fancydancing, Sherman Alexie's look at a successful poet returning to his home on the reservation for an old friend's funeral, and By Hook Or By Crook, a kind of androgynous version of Midnight Cowboy.