Cloistered monks and masked lady wrestlers. A classic-rock deejay and a do-it-yourself mobster. Two basketball hustlers and a clubhouse full of sock puppets.

Those are some of the characters you can meet in the feature films at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase. The annual event begins Saturday, with a series of seminars at the Regional Arts Commission offices on Delmar, and the films run Sunday through next Thursday at the Tivoli Theatre.

Now in its eight year, the event is a locals-only complement to the St. Louis International Film Festival in November. Both events are organized by Cinema St. Louis, and sometimes films that are well received at the Showcase are promoted to the next level. But whereas the Showcase has traditionally focused on shorts, this year’s event is notable for the number of full-length features.

Chris Clark, the managing and artistic director of Cinema St. Louis, says that 27 features films were submitted this year. A dozen of them made the final cut. By comparison, 19 features were submitted last year, and only four were deemed ready to show to the public.

“The local filmmakers have come out swinging,” he says.

What makes the migration to full-length features more impressive is that almost of the directors are amateurs who made the movies in their free time with their own money.

Clark gives some of the credit to the increasing affordability of “pro-sumer” digital-video cameras, which have largely overtaken film cameras as the directors’ weapon of choice.

Aaron Coffman, who directed the college romance “Texas Snow” (screening July 24 at 5 p.m.) says that he couldn’t afford to make the movie on 16mm film. His senior project at Webster University, which was shot on film, was 15 minutes long and cost him $5,000. “Texas Snow,” which was shot with a digital video camera, is 74 minutes long and cost less than $2,000.

A few days after it screens it St. Louis, “Texas Snow” will play at the Free Range Film Festival in Minnesota. But the cash-strapped director won’t be traveling alongside his disk.

Coffman is representative of the many filmmakers who are leveraging local resources instead of moving to one of the coasts. He has entered three scripts in the local CinemaSpoke screenwriting contest, and he was the winner in 2007 for a drama about divorce. His prize was a script appraisal from a Hollywood agent. (Coffman is still waiting to find out if they’ll be doing lunch.)

A fixture in the local filmmaking scene is Patrick Voss, whose 2004 sci-fi spoof “Inbred Redneck Alien Abduction” proved that he knew the Show-Me State inside and out. Voss, who also did gory props and special-effects work for Wyatt Weed’s cable-ready vampire flick “Shadowland” (July 20 at 7 p.m.), adapted his puppeteering skills for “Sockville” (July 20 at noon). The tuneful, hour-long video reveals what happens to socks that get lost in the laundry– they travel to a clubhouse in another dimension and teach kids the value of imagination. Voss is hoping to turn this playful project into a series.

Another potential series is “The Color of Justice” (July 21 at 5 p.m.). Co-director Ronnnell Falaq Bennett caused a sensation at last year’s St. Louis International Film Festival with “Ruzzian Roulette,” a genre-defying docudrama about sexual promiscuity in the local black community. “The Color of Justice” is similarly provocative as it monitors the racial undertones in local law enforcement and such controversial cases as the deaths of two white girl at the Chain of Rocks Bridge in 1991.

A true crime story with spiritual undertones is “St. Benedict’s Rule” (July 20 at 2:15 p.m.), a documentary about a double murder at a monastery in 2002. Director Jay Kantzler brings a unique perspective to the project. He is not only a filmmaker (having directed a documentary about riverboat gambling and produced one about Circus Flora), he’s a criminal attorney—and an episcopal priest.

Coincidentally, this year’s Showcase includes another documentary about a local religious order: “That All May Be One” (July 23 at 5 p.m.), which profiles the community-oriented Sisters of St. Joseph in the Carondolet neighborhood. Director Karen Kearnes lives in Southern California, but her sister is, well, one of the sisters.

A different sort of all-female organization is depicted in “Academy of Doom” (July 23 at 7:15). The comedy from schlock director Chip Gubera of Columbia, Mo., takes place at a school for Mexican-style masked lady wrestlers.

Another organizational comedy is Scott Wibbenmeyer’s “Advertising for the Mob” (July 21 at 7:15 p.m.), a yarn about a copywriter who is fired from his 12th ad agency and decides he’d have more job security if he started his own crime family. (Look for a cameo by Pasta House honcho Kim Tucci.)

The mobs who hobnob on South Grand, the Landing and Locust Street are the focus of “Say Goodnight” (July 22 at 7 p.m.), a comedy about three swingin’ dudes who let three perfect women slip their fingers.

After-dark St. Louis has rarely looked more distinctive than in “Mosquito Kingdom,” (July 20 at 9:30p.m.), a noirish cops-and-robbers drama from co-directors Brad Hodge and Derek Elz. Elz has recently been to Spain and North Africa to film a mockumentary about Jewish-Arab romantic relationships, yet he says that St. Louis is “a gold mine of wonderful locations. I grew up across from Tower Grove Park, so I know the bricks, have climbed the trees, and driven many of the avenues and boulevards of this city that lend themselves to being photographed.”

Elz adds that St. Louisans are friendlier toward film crews than people in bigger cities. Perhaps no one knows that better than Matt Krantz, the director of the sports drama “Streetballers” (which closes the Showcase on July 24 at 7 p.m.). Krantz and former Mizzou hoopster Jimmy McKinney star as hustlers on the local street-basketball circuit. Clark says admiringly that Krantz hustles as hard in the movie biz as his character does on the basketball court. I can attest to that. I met Krantz three years ago, when he was a volunteer at the Sundance Film Festival. On a city bus in Park City, Utah, he handed me a disk with a trailer for “Streetballers,” and confidently predicted that the film would be finished.

Unlike a lot of the people you meet at Sundance, Krantz was true to his word. The completed “Streetballers” screened in June of this year at the Hollywood Black Festival, where it won second place in the feature-film competition.

Krantz shot the movie in gritty working-class neighborhoods around St. Louis. He says the city is a largely untapped resource with talented people who pull together to help complete each other’s projects.

Many of the collegial filmmakers represented in this year’s festival passed through Webster University, where they would have been influenced by Mike Steinberg–not just by the film history and theory classes he has taught there but by the mind-expanding movies he has booked for the Webster Film Series.

The day after the Showcase ends, Steinberg, his wife and his two daughters are moving to Missoula, Mont., where he will become the new director of the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Steinberg will continue to book movies for Webster remotely, and he will return occasionally for special events, such as the visit by actor Crispin Glover on Aug. 22-24; but Steinberg is also leaving his many friends a piece of his heart—his documentary “How it is with Phooie?” (screening in the Showcase on June 20 at 4:45 p.m.).

Ostensibly a profile of his father, obsessive movie buff and former KSHE disc jockey Phil “Phooie” Steinberg, the film evolves into a personal reflection on generational inheritance, both temperamental and material. Like his dad, who used to run the Disc Connection store in Maplewood, Mike Steinberg is an avid collector of vinyl records. The film grew out of separate projects Mike was developing on record collectors and the “KSHE-classic” rock bands of the 1970s. But in the course of filming, Phooie were forced to move from the home where he had built a basement theater, and both father and son reflected on how their obsessions have affected their children.

Mike reports that his two young daughters have inherited his love of the Kinks and bossa nova; but they might inherit their family’s love of movies with a visit to the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase.