The abbreviated event premiering about 30 features and docs marks the bow of the festival's new management and its move to the fall season.

"Consider it the amuse-bouche before the full-blown banquet of Festival 19 next October," Harlan Jacobson, PFF artistic director, said yesterday of the program, which includes films starring George Clooney, Chris Rock and Meg Ryan.

Gray will be on hand to introduce his film on opening night, a day before it reaches theaters nationwide. Director (and West Philadelphia native) Lee Daniels will accompany Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, his acclaimed film about an abuse victim who takes charge of her life and her children, which is the closing-night film on Oct. 18. (Other movies will screen during the day on the 19th.)

Precious, a drama whose producers include Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, received the audience prize for best picture at the Toronto Film Festival, an honor won last year by Slumdog Millionaire.

While organizers finalize the PFF program and venues, some titles are confirmed. The comedies Men Who Stare at Goats, starring Clooney as an eccentric American operative in Iraq, and Serious Moonlight, with Ryan as an attorney who duct-tapes philandering spouse Timothy Hutton to the toilet, are locked in. As is Antichrist, a spousal horror movie from Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier; Red Cliff, an action thriller from Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo; and Good Hair, a doc with Rock on the subject of African American hair.

Among the films with local connections are screenwriter David Brind's Main Line-set Dare, an angsty drama starring Emmy Rossum and Ashley Springer, and Tenure, a romantic comedy with Luke Wilson and Gretchen Mol shot at Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore.

In April, after its annual spring showcase, PFF and its management partner, TLA Video, parted company. TLA will continue to hold a festival in the spring under the name CineFest. PFF, which retained custody of the name, will hold its cinemathon in the fall.

Ticketing and schedule information are available at www.filmadelphia.org.