The festival's Mumbai-based curator, Uma da Cunha, opened the four-day event with Shakespeare Wallah in a nostalgic tip-of-the hat to Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. A perfect opener for a diasporic festival, it was made by that first, now famous Indo American duo in 1965, based on a story written by the supremely "multi-culti," diasporic writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The film deals with the adventures of an itinerant English theater company that toured India in the decade after independence. With its mixed cast of English and Indian actors, its subject remains one of the earliest and funniest depictions of East-West culture conflicts. Da Cunha's other choices showcased North America's newest immigrants coming to terms with the social mores of their adopted country.

Harish Saluja's The Journey, for example, focuses on the widowed father (Roshan Seth) of a successful young Indian-American who comes West to visit his son's family. While his American daughter in-law finds the older man's values and way of life foreign and hard to accept, his granddaughter is open and receptive as only a child can be. Movingly acted and beautifully directed, Saluja's film deals sensitively with cultural conflicts that resonate with every immigrant family and generational conflicts that are universal.

Other conflicts arising from dealing with life in a new country are the subject of the film, Mitr. The "love" marriage between American-born Prithvi, and Lakshmi, his beautiful bride from small town India, sours as they drift apart over two decades in California. Director Revathy, a top-draw South Indian filmstar, uses her heroine's perspective to reveal an immigrant's isolation, her lack of support systems and, above all, her extreme loneliness. Evenhandedly, Revathy gives a fair shake to the frustrations of the success-oriented husband. He views his wife as dependent, even clinging: She cannot make a life for herself outside her family; she shuts out her new environment. The American in Prithvi empathizes with their teenage daughter's desire for independence; Lakshmi, a traditional mother, finds it impossible to let go. The couple's rediscovery of each other (as the "friend," the "mitr," of the title) while anonymously surfing the net provides a happy, Silicon-Valley solution. Revathy came with an all-female technical crew of nine talented professionals from India to make this visually stunning film on location in San Francisco.

By contrast, Gaurav Seth, 32, director of A Passage to Ottawa, studied filmmaking at the iconic Sergei Eisenstein's film institute in Moscow. Seth's subject is an Indian orphan's journey to his new home in Canada and his adjustment to a very different life in his uncle's family. Race, a central issue in the film, is tackled in many guises: The uncle's marriage to a white Canadian, his teenage daughter's interracial dating, the boy's friendship with a black Canadian who becomes the youngster's chosen "hero" (and who, in an ironic twist, insists he is a "native" Canadian since his family did "not come from any other place"), and the cruel violence of prejudice seen in local children. The film plumbs the child's confusion honestly by steering clear of sentimental stereotypes. A stellar performance by a winsome nine-year-old nonprofessional actor and Seth's restraint combine to make A Passage to Ottawa a haunting film about losses and transitions.

In Chutney Popcorn, a very different kind of film, director Nisha Ganatra, a young PBS producer, takes on issues that have never before been dealt with in Indian cinema, casting Madhur Jaffrey (of Shakespeare Wallah fame) and her daughter, Sakina Jaffrey, as a New York mother and daughter. Ganatra plays the second daughter, a lesbian, who agrees to help her infertile sister and white American brother-in-law by becoming a surrogate mother for their child. Interracial marriage, artificial insemination, an openly gay lifestyle with all its attendant accoutrements (leather jackets, motorbikes, gay housemates), and an older immigrant mom who, while seemingly traditional, is not only single but happy with whatever her American daughters bring home‹these make up Ganatra's unorthodox material. Her subject is, in fact, so radical that she could not find a South Asian to play the lesbian daughter and was compelled‹her reluctance stemming from artistic, not moral reasons‹to play the part herself. And Ganatra is as fine an actress as she is a bold director. Popcorn does not shy away from the complexities of human (especially sibling) relationships. Here is a South Asian totally at ease in her American skin. We definitely want to see more courageous artists like her, willing to take risks with topical, if difficult, subjects in this, our "brave new world."

Fittingly, the only director to have two films in the Festival was Mira Nair. A woman who came to America two decades ago as a student, learned filmmaking at Harvard University, stayed on to marry an American Jew, and later, an East African Muslim, Nair is the epitome of the successful, multicultural, immigrant filmmaker: She has made it in her adopted country and in Hollywood. For IAAC, Da Cunha picked My Own Country, Nair's feature based on Ethiopian-Indian-American Abraham Verghese's intensely personal memoir of treating Tennessee's AIDS patients as they came home to die in the early 80s, and Monsoon Wedding, Nair's newest work which later won the Golden Globe award at this year's Venice Film Festival.

My Own Country was another felicitous choice for a diaspora festival: set in the heartland of the rural deep South, the film's cast of characters is largely American, the subject of AIDS in the 80s is quintessentially Western, and the protagonist, in search of an identity and a home, is a South Asian doctor whose marriage founders on the unrelenting demands of his AIDS practice. Naveen Andrews plays Verghese in a film that remains faithful to one of the most moving accounts of AIDS in America. Like the book, the movie exposes the toll that the disease took on its first young gay patients, on their down-home community, and on a doctor who became emotionally engaged in that community through his work.

The festival concluded with Monsoon Wedding, a thoroughly enjoyable romp that played to a full house. A charming, deceptively glitzy-looking, low-budget fun film, Wedding was shot in Delhi in three weeks with stage veterans and art film actors who worked for next to nothing. Its diasporic connection? The subject: immigrants returning home to India for a family reunion. And issues‹adultery, sexual abuse, incest‹that are an international auteur's concerns, not the escapist fare of Bollywood. Indian cinema, even if only in the hands of the diaspora's directors, has finally come of age by catching up with real life.

The Indo-American Arts Council, the non-profit New York organization that arranged the Diaspora Film Festival is the welcome brainchild of Aroon Shivdasani who imaginatively puts together an annual arts event each year. In recent years, she has staged a theater festival by importing plays, playwrights, actors and directors from India, and collaborated with the off-off Broadway Lark Theater Company to stage readings of three new Indo-American plays by multinational actors. The very fact that organizations like the IAAC are beginning to showcase the creative works of South Asians is proof‹if indeed any were needed‹that the community is putting down roots in the New World.