Why did Un prophète win the Grand Jury prize at Cannes last year? Because it’s an absorbing, gritty prison drama following the unsentimental education of a quietly appealing young man as he learns, struggles and triumphs, executed with a high degree of skill and clear-eyed unsentimentality, and boasting a satisfyingly dense texture and enough stylistic flourishes to give the film its own distinctive character.

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And so the 25th Santa Barbara Film Festival came to an end on Sunday. It celebratde its quarter century with pride, but didn’t go overboard, with the usual fairly glitzy tributes – Julianne Moore, James Cameron, Jeff Bridges, Colin Firth – and middling Hollywood fare to open and close (Flying Lessons, a popular worst-of-the-festival, and Middle Men which didn’t look like being much better). But the real meat was in between.

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What with strands covering Quebecois, Asian, Eastern Bloc and Latin American cinema at this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival, western European cinema is a bit thin on the ground, so I was pleased of the chance to see a German film. Draußen am see (literally “outside at the lake”) is the debut feature of writer/director Felix Fuchssteiner and deserved winner of the Young German Cinema actress and production awards at Munich last year.

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The Santa Barbara Film Festival’s Eastern Bloc strand throws up an interesting array of films from former communist countries, each of Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania et al having their own distinct – and usually skewed and blackly humourous – national personality. Poland’s official Oscar submission this year is Boris Lankosz’s Rewers and it strikes me as being particularly Polish, not simply in its post-Warsaw uprising atmosphere (it’s largely set in 1952) and its seamless integration of newsreel footage into the warm black and white narrative (more effective even than in Vincere) but also in its matter-of-fact macabreness and unsettling technique.

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The Santa Barbara Film Festival is always good for some far out Asian cinema. A late addition to this year’s programme was the Hong Kong thriller Accident. Produced by legend Johnny To and directed by Pou-soi Cheang, it’s a sort of strange throwback to both a stylish 80s kind of thriller and to the grubby US cinema of paranoia of the 70s, as well as being stylish, moody Hong Kong through and through.

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Last year at the Santa Barbara Film Festival I saw the rather splendid 20^th-Century Boys, first of a trilogy that became Japan’s top box office series of all time. I was hoping for at least one of the sequels this year, but instead we got something if anything even weirder, from out-there bad boy Takashi Miike, Crows Zero II.

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The Santa Barbara Film Festival is an excellent chance to catch a selection of various countries’ official submissions to the Academy for the foreign film category. This year, Finland has chosen Klaus Härö’s Postia pap Jaakobille (although the Academy did not).

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There has been a strong showing of South American films at this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival, with Argentina leading the way. For a decade or so the government has been increasingly subsidizing the local cinema industry, to produce well-made, classy films that can beat Hollywood at its own game. But in response to growing state control, a faction has formed loosely around filmmaker and teacher Mariano Llinás to produce a project of a far more adventurous nature. Although not a glossy product by any means, it’s to the credit of Aguas verdes that it could be from either camp (funded in part, by both the government and the national film school).

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If I’ve learned one thing from the Quebecois Cinema strand at this year’s Santa Barbara Film Festival it’s that, that part of Canada produces great character actors. From the jaunty opening, Les doigts croches is an unashamedly broad comedy (set somewhat randomly in 1964) that sees five little league losers making a 515-mile pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in order to get their mitts on millions of dollars.

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