In Hollywood Dreams, an Iowa woman is thrown a curve by love.

By the time the deadline for entries to the Rhode Island International Film Festival rolled around on May 15, nearly 2,500 hopeful filmmakers had submitted their movies for consideration to the moviefest which opens its 11th year Tuesday night with a gala premiere of several short films at the Providence Performing Arts Center, including one made by Jennifer Aniston.

Deadlines. Shmedlines.

May 15 came and went and by June 15, says festival executive director and founder George Marshall, another 400 films had arrived at his offices above the Columbus Theater on Broadway. By the 25th of July, he added, less than two weeks before opening night, he was still receiving entries from filmmakers who desperately wanted their films to have a berth in the festival.

It’s a familiar story for Marshall and his staff, something that happens year after year when they begin taking in entries for the next year’s festival in September. It points up the hassles of trying to organize a program that attracts entrants from around the world, including such far-flung places as Siberia, China and Romania.

Each of them wants his or her film to be seen by as many people as possible and, fingers crossed, walk away with an award which will gain them recognition and serve as a prod for entry into other film festivals or even the big enchilada — a pickup by a film distributor.

“An award here is a credential that jump-starts careers,” says Marshall, not immodestly since the RIIFF is one of only 61 festivals, out of more than 3,000 worldwide, that can qualify a short film for Academy Award consideration. In 2006, two films that premiered at RIIFF — Disney’s animated The Little Matchgirl and the documentary Recycled Life — went on to become Oscar nominees. “A win here allows them to go on to another festival,” says Marshall. “A lot of them will go on to Montreal,” which is the next big festival on the calendar.

This year, RIIFF will screen 320 films over six days at venues ranging from the elegant PPAC and Columbus theaters to Slater Mill Park in downtown Pawtucket, where Elvis Presley will sing and wriggle his way under the stars with Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas Thursday.

“We have a record number of world premieres — 140,” added Marshall, plus 32 that are U.S. premieres and 15 that are North American premieres. While 320 films may sound like a daunting number, even to the most dedicated movie fan, it should be noted that many are films of 3 to 14 minutes. Nevertheless, all of them, plus the 2,000-plus rejects, have been seen by at least three judges and some by many more over 10 months.

FESTIVAL MANAGING director Don Farias says that last September, when entries for this week’s festival began arriving, the judging started with each film being seen by at least three people in the first round.

If a film got enough “yes” votes, it went on to the next round to be seen by more judges. Those passing this muster would go on to yet another round of judging and then another. Farias says that by June “there were more than 400 films that still had received all ‘yeses’ from every one of the judges, but we had to reject 100 of them because we just can’t show 400 films.”

And some had won awards at festivals elsewhere. “Some of them were shown at [the prestigious] Sundance and Tribeca [festivals] and were rejected here,” Farias added with a go-figure shrug.

It’s not an easy process because, as Marshall puts it, “Every filmmaker looks at their films as their babies.” Not only do the films arrive at the RIIFF offices, as the film festival approaches the staff is bombarded by phone calls and e-mails from the filmmakers concerned about screening times and venues. “One of the joys is talking to the filmmakers,” says festival associate producing director Demetria Carr, “because they don’t want to quite let go.”

Yet more often than the festival staff would like, sometimes a venue must be changed at the last minute, throwing the tightly wound schedule off track, because a filmmaker hadn’t been accurate about something as basic as the film’s format. The perplexed festival staff must scramble to find a new site for an entry that they have been told was going to be a 35-mm print, but is actually a digital video.

“Maybe,” says Marshall, “they didn’t have enough money to make 35-mm prints. If the film was scheduled to be shown at the Columbus there’s no problem because they have equipment for every format. But if it was scheduled somewhere else, it’s a problem.”

WITH SO MANY SEATS to fill — PPAC has nearly 3,000; the Columbus nearly 1,000 — RIIFF has developed what Carr calls a “community outreach program.” The festival staff knows they can count on filmmakers to bring family and friends to screenings of their films. In the past some filmmakers have even resorted to standing on Providence street corners handing out flyers and exhorting passersby to come see their movie, especially if it’s being shown at an off hour, such as 11 a.m. Thursday or 2:30 p.m. Friday.

But in order to “guarantee bodies in the house,” as Marshall puts it, Carr says they’ve “reached out to offer seats to non-profits.” A number of tickets are given away to non-profits which can then sell them to their supporters and keep all the money. The non-profit wins, but so does the film festival, which not only gets people to see the movies, but may entice them to return for other shows.

Some of those films will be familiar. Besides Presley’s Viva Las Vegas, which will be shown outdoors at dusk at the Westminster Street park opposite Caffe Tazza in downtown Providence as well as at Slater Mill Park in downtown Pawtucket, Jon Raben will return to the Columbus for a screening of his entertaining documentary Italian Americans and Federal Hill. Although Raben’s film had its premiere there last year in September, it wasn’t ready in time for the 2006 RIIFF. This year it’s an official selection and will be screened at 6 p.m. Aug. 11 in the Columbus’s 840-seat downstairs auditorium.

Marshall says that “if filmmakers want to be up for an award, they pay an entrance fee of $30 to $50, depending on the time of year.” As the deadline approaches, the fee jumps to the higher amount.

Although the RIIFF has presented movies across the state in years past, this year there will be only a scattering of screenings in Pawtucket, West Kingston and Narragansett. Most films will be shown at venues in Providence, ranging from the Providence Public Library to the big-screen Feinstein IMAX (for a series of children’s films) and from the intimate Cable Car Cinema to the cavernous Providence Performing Arts Center, which this year will host the opening-night gala and short films program.

“We wanted something a little more spectacular than last year,” says Marshall of the change from the Columbus, which had been the traditional opening-night location. Not to worry. The Columbus will show many of the biggest films during the festival, including a special 7 p.m. Aug. 10 screening of comedian Harold Lloyd’s final silent film, 1928’s Speedy, about a man who saves his girl’s grandfather’s trolley business. It will be shown in a restored print with musical accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra in the pit.

TUESDAY’S OPENING NIGHT at PPAC, billed as “A Salute to the Art of the Short Film,” will be preceded by a $100-a-ticket cocktail reception in the theater’s Marquee Room and followed by a $35-a-ticket party in the theater lobby.

The $15-a-ticket screenings, beginning at 7 p.m., will include Aniston’s Room 10, about a nurse who develops an unexpected relationship with a dying woman. Also on the program is Orchids, a film directed by Bryce Dallas Howard, the star of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village and Spider-Man 3. Kris Kristofferson and Robin Wright Penn star in this tale of a photographer who opens the heart of a widower who refuses to leave his house. Joseph Mazzello, who co-starred in Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, will make his directorial debut in Matters of Life and Death, about three siblings faced with the unexpected loss of their parents. Also in the opening-night mix will be Tanghi Argentini, an uplifting comedy, and The Happiest Day of My Life in which male-female roles are reversed.

Opening night will even feature a film that won’t be on the PPAC’s 50-foot-wide screen, but installed in the foyer near the box office. Andrew Filippone Jr.’s documentary Happy Monday is not really a film at all, but a tangible, physical object. He calls it a “documentary film object.” Basically, it’s a large light box — 8 by 4 by 4 feet — on top of which sits strips of 16-mm film negatives that have been cut and arranged into a vague human body shape lying on its back, its chest splayed. The film negative is from Filippone’s uncompleted 1996 narrative short, Happy Monday, Mrs. Krebs and viewers will be able to walk up to Happy Monday, linger over it and read its individual frames, a frozen document of a film that never was.

That night, the festival will also present its first Roger Williams Independent Voice Award to Christine Vachon, an independent film producer and Brown University graduate, whose films include Boys Don’t Cry.

Clearly, RIIFF tries to pull together a lot of different kinds of films and is open to new ideas and a bit of playfulness. Wednesday’s world premiere screening of From the 50 Yard Line, is about a pair of high school marching bands, and Rhode Island College’s brass quintet Brass Odyssey will play from 6 to 7 p.m. in the Columbus lobby.

Tickets for most screenings are $10. For advance tickets visit www.RIFilmFest.org or buy them at the box office.

mjanuson@projo.com