Alas, I couldn’t attend the opening-night gala for the St. Louis International Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday at the Tivoli with a screening of “Humboldt County.”  I could have ended up at Mandarin, doing Jaegermeister shots with Paul Schrader (legendarily intense writer of “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver’). But on Day Two, I got to shake Schrader’s hand before he presented his new film. It’s an offbeat Holocaust drama called “Adam Resurrected,” starring Jeff Goldblum as a circus clown who uses his wits to outsmart the Nazis. Schrader expressed some mock surprise that there was still such a thing as a newspaper movie critic. I told him that much of my job now happens online, and I mentioned that I am Twittering during the fest. He suggested I put in a good word for his film, which I am honored to do.

Then I watched two of the five films that I am judging in the New Filmmakers Forum competition for first-time directors. “Yeast” is a very up-close psychodrama about feuding roommates that reminded me of John Cassavetes. “Pretty Ugly People” is a kind of “Big Chill” in the woods, with a weight-loss subtext. (On Saturday, I’ll see three more NFF films, including “Streetballers” by St. Louisan Matt Krentz.)

The night ended at Pi, which is a swank new pizza place and not a theme restaurant based on Darren Aronofsky movies (although that might be fun, with a “Fountain” room for ice cream and soda, a “Wrestler” room for kitsch entertainment and a “Requiem for a Dream” shooting gallery in the basement).

There I met Jim Finn, the former St. Louisan who screened his mind-blowing “Interkosmos” and “The Juche Idea” at Webster. (Earlier in the day, his Communist-themed parody films had blown the minds of students in a film class at Clayton High School.) Finn and I compared conspiracy theories and he promised to send me a copy of “Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo,” his contraband spoof of Peru’s Maoist “Shining Path” guerilla movement. He told me that at a screening in Argentina, he met some exiled members of Shining Path, who offered him a few pointers. Here’s mine: Keep making cool movies, comrade.