For Fox Searchlight, which releases Beasts of the Southern Wild on Wednesday, the 2012 Los Angeles Film Festival could not have worked out any better.

Benh Zeitlin’s acclaimed apocalyptic drama, a multiple prize winner at both Cannes and Sundance, generated another swamp load of positive buzz during the downtown event’s first weekend and has now added LAFF’s Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. There is no doubt this New Orleans-minted master work will roll on as the summer’s dominant indie theatrical release.

Also celebrating LAFF Audience Awards are Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore (Best Documentary Feature, Birth Story: Ina Mary Gaskin and the Farm Midwives), Malik Bendjellou (Best International Feature, Searching for Sugar Man), Bryan Buckley (Best Short Film, Asad) and Lex Halaby (Best Music Video, Piranhas Club: Man Man). Buckley is from South Africa, but his short, in Somalian with subtitles, is all about a little boy in the war-torn country. It previously won the Best Narrative Short award at Tribeca.

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It’s an expensive undertaking. But Los Angeles Film Festival artistic director David Ansen tells David Poland he is determined not to lose the element that he believes makes his annual event so unique.

That would be the annual “filmmaker retreat,” which took place once again this year just ahead of LAFF’s start. From Ansen’s DP/30 conversation with Poland:

“At most film festivals, filmmakers come in from all over the world, they don’t know anybody, they’re in a strange city… They do their thing and they leave and they never really interact. We bring all our feature filmmakers who can come, together, just before the festival starts. We do it up at Skywalker Ranch, which is an idyllic setting.”

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It’s a question many Los Angeles Film Festival watchers have been pondering this week. How the heck did Film Independent manage to convince Woody Allen to make an appearance at tonight’s opening night gala screening of To Rome With Love?

Based on the above Hollywood Reporter headline, a brief Q&A with artistic director David Ansen conducted by Gregg Kilday has the tantalizing answer. Not so fast. Hilariously (given the headline), here’s the non-answer provided by the critic-turned-programmer when asked about The Woodman’s rare west coast public appearance:

“I don’t know what his thought process was… I had told Tom Bernard and Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics that we’d really like to have Woody for opening night. And they came back a few days later and said, “We’re on.”

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A year ago, David Ansen‘s Newsweek checks were being issued on the east coast. Twelve months later, his fleeting publication has been consumed by The Daily Beast and he is doubling as artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Which makes for an unusually interesting Best Movies of 2010 preface. Ansen notes that because of his new LAFF post, he saw more movies this year than ever before and traveled far beyond the usual mainstream pale of publicist sponsored screening rooms.

Writes Ansen:

Unless you were in the privileged position to see movies at film festivals around the world, you’d have no idea how many good movies never see the light of day in U.S. theaters.

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