The Sundance Avalanche : The movers and shakers in Hollywood descend on the 16th edition of the annual film festival, which keeps growing--in attendance, venues and prestige.

Like the unruly adolescent it is, the Sundance Film Festival continues to grow and grow. Unlike most teenagers, however, a sense of order is starting to become visible in how this most important American festival manages its ever-expanding bulk.

Sundance starts tonight with a screening of “Brassed Off,” a British film about a brass band in a struggling coal mining town that somehow fuses the sensibilities of Benny Hill, “Rocky” and the Communist Manifesto. That’s the first of 127 features to be shown over 11 days, including 71 world premieres and 34 American debuts.

All that cinema won’t be lacking for an audience. The festival, which recorded 50,000 admissions two years ago, will just about double that this year. The film-mad take over the ski resort town of Park City, Utah, booking its best restaurants as early as November, and clogging its streets with rental cars and cellular phones.

In a Sisyphean attempt to make way for the invading hordes, the festival has this year shoe-horned a pair of new theaters into a local hotel, added a second screen in Salt Lake City and even one in Ogden. It has also mandated one more screening per day per theater, which means movies will be starting earlier and ending later. Whether the 800-seat theater now under construction will help the situation when it debuts next year remains an open question.

Most of the interest, as always, is in the dramatic competition, where 18 films were culled from some 600 submissions, a huge leap from the 250 entered just two years ago. “I meet people in so many walks of life and they’re always grabbing a camera,” says festival director Geoffrey Gilmore, sounding both heartened and unnerved by that torrent of celluloid. “People used to go to a garret and paint. Now it’s ‘I’m a filmmaker.’ ” Even the short films have gotten deeply competitive: 60 were selected from 1,200 submitted, with both Gus Van Sant and Sandra Bullock among the chosen directors.

So what does it take to get into the feature dramatic competition (which this year has added a new honor, the directing award)? It’s almost essential, apparently, to be unknown: Just about all the films selected are from first-time filmmakers. And, if the program notes are any guide, a tendency toward alienation and anomie isn’t a drawback either.

If the earnest and undiscovered crowd the competition, the bigger independent names are similarly concentrated in the Premieres section. All fenced in together are new films by an A-list of alternative directors: David Lynch (“Lost Highway”), Errol Morris (“Fast Cheap & Out of Control”), Robert Downey (“Hugo Pool”), Victor Nunez (“Ulee’s Gold”), Tom DiCillo (“Box of Moonlight”), Richard Linklater (“SubUrbia”) and Kevin Smith (“Chasing Amy”). And there’s even room for the film version of Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning “Love! Valour! Compassion!”

The Premieres section is also used by studios that want to showcase their independent-leaning late January releases. This year Gramercy is bringing “GRIDLOCK’d,” with the late rapper Tupac Shakur, and Disney has “Prefontaine,” the story of the celebrated distance runner directed by Steve James, who made his reputation at Sundance with the now-classic documentary “Hoop Dreams.”

This year’s documentary competition, often a Sundance high spot, is also rife with unfamiliar names, though Arthur Dong, whose “Coming Out Under Fire” won a special jury award, returns with “Licensed to Kill,” a potent and disturbing look at the plague of violence, up to and including murder, against gay men.

If there is a trend in the documentary competition, it is the increasing number of films--this year it’s six out of 16--that are funded completely or in part by the Independent Television Service, or ITVS. Though little known, ITVS is a government entity created by an act of Congress in 1991 to encourage risky programming for public television that “addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences.” Its films this year include “The Fight in the Fields,” an examination of the life of Cesar Chavez, and “Girls Like Us,” which follows four years in the lives of four teenagers from South Philly.

Though not funded by ITVS, fated to be one of the most talked about documentaries in competition is the aptly named “Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist.” A graphic, unnerving report from the wilder shores of human interaction, “Sick’s” look at a disarmingly witty man who was passionate about the painful mutilation of his body (including his sexual organs) is the epitome of bad traffic accident cinema: wrenching, even horrific, but as difficult to take your eyes off as it is to watch.

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The festival’s major question mark remains the American Spectrum section. Nominally created for features that did not quite make the cut for the competition, the Spectrum last year included both “Manny & Lo” and “Ed’s Next Move,” two of the most appealing, audience-friendly films of the entire festival.

Similarly likable this time around is the evocatively titled “I Love You . . . Don’t Touch Me!” by first-time director-screenwriter-producer-editor Julie Davis. Witty, warm-hearted and mischievous, it details the romantic conflicts of an amusingly neurotic young woman, still a virgin at 25, who is determined to settle for nothing less than the perfect man.

Though its 35 films make it one of the festival’s biggest components, the World Cinema section is not where the heat or the crowds usually are because its selections tend to be known quantities.

Among the noteworthy films this time around are “Kolya” from the Czech Republic, a front-runner for the best foreign film Oscar; the Russian “Prisoner of the Mountains,” winner of the International Critics Prize at Cannes; “Stella Does Tricks,” a hit at the London film festival; and the charming Australian campus romance “Love and Other Catastrophes.” Also a success from Australia and placed in the Premieres category is the wickedly funny “Love Serenade,” which took the prestigious Camera d’Or at Cannes.

Given all this, it’s fitting that even Sundance’s brash intracity rival, the Slamdance Festival, has gotten more exclusive and upscale, selecting 45 films out of a reported 1,000 entered. Slamdance boasts its own corporate sponsors (Thrifty Car Rental seems especially appropriate) and a complex at Main Street’s Treasure Mountain Inn that includes “a screening room, a hospitality suite, press/reception area and cigar lounge.”

You have been warned.