SIFF today announced the local component of the fest, which runs May 21-June 14. (We’ll publish our SIFF Guide on May 20; the festival site goes live with full schedule on Thurs., May 7.) No surprise that local director Lynn Shelton’s Humpday gets the most attention. It got nice buzz at Sundance, and already has a distribution deal with Magnolia for August release. She’s had two prior films in the fest, 2006’s We Go Way Back, and last year’s My Effortless Brilliance.But what about those other local films that don’t involve straight dudes having sex with straight dudes? Can’t they get any love? And how local are they? Keep reading after the jump…SIFF’s local sidebar is called “Northwest Connections,” which is meant to be a somewhat elastic category. I know, as do SIFF programmers, that if you limit yourself to Seattle-only filmmakers, the results are pretty poor. You’ve got to cast the net wider, as the fest has done for the past couple years. Thus, among 16 features and docs (plus 13 shorts), we’ll be seeing a documentary about a Cambodian ballet dancer, made by his rich New York patron (Anne Bass), who winds up at PNB. The dancer is Sokvannara Sar, and the film is Dancing Across Borders. (Dates for this and other films below are still pending.)Over in Spokane, Julie Davis’ Finding Bliss is about an aspiring female film director (uh-oh) renting space in a porn studio, who then finds herself a sympathetic collaborator with a porno director. (Why does this sound like Humpday? Has the whole world turned to porn? Don’t answer that question.)You’ve likely heard of the Robin Williams-starring World’s Greatest Dad, which was shot in Seattle last summer by writer-director (and former comic) Bobcat Goldthwait. We can only hope that Williams, who’s recently suffered a heart illness, recovers swiftly and might possibly attend the fest. This film did well at Sundance, and would surely be a candidate as the SIFF opening-night gala feature. (Could you imagine Williams taking the Paramount stage on opening night? They’d never be able to start the movie.)Also from Sundance, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle is a genuinely made-in-Seattle feature by David Russo, an artist and short filmmaker accustomed to working off the radar. It’s a feature about janitors, we think, which might not be a bad career path in the current economy.An Eastern Washington back-to-the-land hippie group is the subject of the documentary Back to the Garden, Flower Power Comes Full Circle. With recession victory gardens and local-and-organic the mania these days, it sounds pretty topical.Seattle director Sandy Cioffi got herself arrested in Nigeria while making her anti-oil doc Sweet Crude. You can’t buy that kind of publicity, and our Prius-loving city should eat up her eco-message.From Friday Harbor, up in the San Juan Islands, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and it’s flamboyant, publicity loving Paul Watson is documented in Pirate for the Sea. He’s the guy who chases down Japanese whaling vessels and the like, getting shot en route. Previously the subject of a great New Yorker profile, Watson will be at the Cannes Film Festival with the film. After that, perhaps he’ll set sail to visit us.I definitely want to see It Takes a Cult, about the Love-Israel collective that lasted from 1968-84 here in Seattle; it was made by former member, Eric Johannsen, who was raised in the group.And nothing is more local than zombies, who lay siege to Port Gamble (on the Kitsap Peninsula) in ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction.