Alfred Molina and Katherine Waterston in Bryce Howard’s Orchids.

The 11th annual Rhode Island International Film Festival begins its six-day run tonight at the Providence Performing Arts Center with a $100-a-ticket cocktail reception at 5 and a $35-a-ticket gala party in the lobby at 9. Sandwiched in between are screenings of seven short films (tickets for that are $15) on the giant screen, plus a movie-themed installation that will sit in the theater’s foyer near the box office.

The later is Andrew Filippone Jr.’s Happy Monday. Even though opening night festivities are a celebration of short films, Happy Monday can’t quite be called a short film … or even a film at all. Happy Monday celebrates a movie that never was finished, Filippone’s 1996 Happy Monday, Mrs. Krebs. The 16-mm negative of what Filippone had filmed back then has been cut up, arranged in a vaguely human body shape and placed atop a large light box so visitors can pause to look at what might have been. Certainly this will be the most unusual aspect of this year’s film festival.

On screen at PPAC, beginning at 7 p.m., will be more traditional short films, including those in which actresses Jennifer Aniston and Bryce Dallas Howard make their directorial debuts.

Aniston’s Room 10, co-directed with Andrea Buchanan from Buchanan’s script, is a powerfully emotional piece starring Robin Wright Penn and Kris Kristofferson. I dare anyone who has ever been in love to watch Aniston’s 19-minute film and not come away with a tear in the eye.

Penn plays Frannie Jones, a harried nurse at a big-city hospital who is having problems in her marriage. In the middle of running around the ward to look in on patients, arguing with the staff and trying to keep a suicidal woman under control, Frannie checks in on a new patient in Room 10, an old woman who has a very short time left to live. When she looks in on the woman a short time later, the woman’s husband of 45 years (Kristofferson) is sitting by her side, holding her hand, trying to ease the woman’s way on her final journey.

What follows is a lovely exchange between Penn and Kristofferson as he lays out the life he has shared with this fragile dying woman, including many of the bad times that accompanied the good. “Sometimes you just get tired of being married,” he says wearily, something which touches a nerve in Frannie at that moment. And yet the love and tenderness he feels is made very real by Kristofferson’s lovely, open performance.

His story moves Frannie to reassess her own life and marriage and it may do likewise with members of the audience. It’s a solid piece of filmmaking and Aniston should be proud, as should her actors, who give natural performances.

Howard, the star of such films as The Village and Spider-Man 3 and the daughter of Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard, makes her mark in the wispy Orchids.

Katherine Waterston plays a novice photographer who, by chance, spies an ad from a “middle-aged widower seeking a female companion.” She’s intrigued, especially by the line in the ad: “Good set of teeth and a clean police record required.”

On a lark, she visits the unhappy man, played by Alfred Molina, who lives in an enormous mansion. It’s soon clear that not only is he lonely, but eccentric. He has not left the mansion since the death of his wife some time earlier. Even to take a step outside the front door to pick up a photograph that his visitor has dropped is painful.

What follows is a coming realization by the woman, who was at first frightened away by his advances, that he has touched her in a subtle way and that this relationship has only just begun. Orchids is a sweet film and Howard, like Aniston, demonstrates that she has as much talent behind the camera as she has in front of it.

Other films in tonight’s program include Matters of Life & Death, in which three siblings struggle to keep control of their lives following the unexpected deaths of their parents; Personal Spectator, about a woman’s surprising encounter with a stranger; Tanghi Argentini, a comedy about an unusual Christmas gift; The Happiest Day of His Life, in which the male-female roles are reversed; and Welcome Home, which celebrates the changing times.

mjanuson@projo.com