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Filmmaking is exploding in New Mexico, and the Santa Fe Film Festival can't contain it all.

This year the state is complementing the seventh annual fest with the New Mexico Film Expo - filmmaking workshops and the screening of 60 locally made films.

So, for five days starting today, filmmakers from all over the state will converge on Santa Fe, followed by five days of international guests at the film festival, which starts Wednesday.

Among the movies you'll find:

"Help, If I May Ask," a 23-minute film by Santa Fe high school student Jordan McKittrick about Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb visiting Los Alamos in 2005.

"Committing Poetry in Times of War," which recounts the struggle of anti-war poets silenced by Rio Rancho High School at the start of the war in Iraq in 2003.

"Hand of God," a filmmaker's study of his brother, a onetime Albuquerque resident, confronting his past as a survivor of abuse at the hands of a priest in Massachusetts in the 1960s.

Jodi Delaney, a program director in the New Mexico Film Office, said the workshops today and Saturday will bring people from a wide range of disciplines together in one place. For example, music composers and filmmakers will interact.

"That's something I really wanted to do, because filmmakers and composers don't always connect," Delaney said.

Registration for the workshops, being held at Hotel Santa Fe, filled quickly. The Film Office put together a waiting list for those who want to attend.

"I've been in this position almost a year, and I'm always surprised at the response we get" for filmmaker events, Delaney said.

"There's a lot of pent-up energy for this kind of thing - or something," she said. "There's a lot of energy here (in New Mexico), and everything we've done here has gotten a good response."

• The pre-festival workshops feature a big-name lineup:

• Entertainment lawyer Peter Dekom will discuss marketing and distribution.

• Gregory Nava ("El Norte," "Selena") will conduct a directors workshop.

• Barbara Martinez-Jitner, who has won an Emmy and a Golden Globe, will talk about writing.

• Experts from Kodak and Apple will lead technical workshops.

The film festival itself has gained some muscle in the seventh season since its revival in 2000.

National Geographic is bringing the entire lineup of its All Roads Film Project, which focuses on global indigenous moviemaking. The slate began its nationwide tour in Los Angeles in late September.

Panavision and Kodak are on board as national sponsors.

On the international front, Santa Fe will screen top titles from around the world, including 2007 Oscar entries from Europe and some of the top contenders from the spring Cannes Film Festival. "Lives of Others," Germany's Oscar selection, sold out this week. It's about the East German secret police before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Closer to home, the annual Governor's Cup competition - which solicits scripts in spring - will be spotlighted at the film festival. The four completed short films will be screened Dec. 8.

The state's investment in filmmaking - especially the technical track at universities and community colleges - is starting to pay dividends. Jon Bowman, director of the Santa Fe Film Festival, pointed to Mark Medoff's "100 MPG," a narrative short that was made at New Mexico State. Medoff's film will be paired with "A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash," a feature-length documentary that Bowman said is a sleeper on this year's slate.

Bowman said the expo and the film festival combine to make "10 straight days of a film buff's delight." He paused and then added: "And a film-festival organizer's cross to bear, I suppose."

Bowman picked out a few other highlights for this year's fest:

"First Snow" The thriller starring Guy Pearce ("Memento") that was shot in Albuquerque last year.

"The Astronaut Farmer" Mark and Michael Polish, the brothers who directed "Norfolk" and "Twin Falls Idaho," will return to the festival to splash "Astronaut," which was filmed in northern New Mexico. It stars Billy Bob Thornton, Virginia Madsen and Bruce Willis.

"Aksuat" This last-minute addition is a 1999 drama about a village in Kazakhstan. Kind of a reality check in shadow of the "Borat" phenomenon. Director Serik Aprimov is expected to introduce his film.

"Darkon" A documentary about the bizarre world of a "full-contact medieval fantasy war-gaming group."

"What's powerful about it," Bowman said, "is it gets into the mind-set of people who inhabit a whole different world."

And with that, welcome to cinema in Santa Fe in 2006.