Amy Scott previews the fest in this week's film section:

When David Lynch was 20 years old, he created the minute-long animated short Six Men Getting Sick for $200 and premiered it at his college's end-of-the-year gallery exhibition. Five years later, Lynch started what would become the drawn-out production process for his masterpiece Eraserhead, partially funding it with paychecks from the Wall Street Journal (he delivered papers). Everybody's got to start somewhere, right?

Nowadays, thanks to the National Film Festival for Talented Youth, such first exposures might go down in a state-of-the-art theater like Seattle's gorgeous Cinerama, in front of a packed and rapturous audience. NFFTY is the largest youth film festival in the world, this year featuring more than 200 works, all of them by people 22 years of age or younger. Following are not-to-be-missed highlights of the festival from directors you will hear about again...

Read the whole thing here.