Palm Springs Festival Blooms Rapidly : Movies: By stressing quality over quantity, the event in only its third year has attained a level of respectability that other festivals have taken a decade to reach.

The weeklong Palm Springs International Film Festival, which opens tonight with Mike Newell’s “Enchanted April,” a period British comedy featuring Joan Plowright and Miranda Richardson, has accomplished in only three years what other festivals take at least a decade to achieve.

That’s because Palm Springs mayor and festival founder Sonny Bono and his longtime business manager, Denis Pregnolato, launched the annual event with a combination of show-biz and fiscal savvy that has allowed it to come close to breaking even in its first two years.

On the one hand, they established a policy of not overreaching, avoiding the pitfall of offering more films and programs than the traffic could possibly bear; on the other, Bono’s celebrity assured instant media attention.

Although Pregnolato has resigned as executive director to become vice president of foreign acquisitions for Spelling International, he remains active on the festival board, as does Bono, who is busy with his race for the U.S. Senate.

“I guess the festival is still my very No. 1 love for Palm Springs,” said Bono. “I think this will be the turn-of-the-corner festival, the one that lets us be taken seriously for setting a standard for a special festival. The idea is for people to be able to check out the art form rather than getting involved in the financial aspect of the business. Too much of the time people are interested only in how much a movie costs to make and how much it grossed.”

From the start, the festival has avoided the pitfall of settling for second-rate Hollywood fare--the best major pictures being perennially reserved for Cannes or Berlin--and has placed quality over quantity. As a result, this year the festival will offer six world premieres, 30 U.S. premieres, plus 15 official entries for Oscar nominations in the best foreign-language film category. By contrast, last year the festival presented three world premieres, 20 U.S. premieres and seven foreign entries for Oscar consideration.

“This is a festival without any filler,” said Darryl Macdonald, its artistic director. Also the director and co-founder of Seattle’s prestigious 17-year-old festival and director of programming for Vancouver’s festival, Macdonald explained that “it’s a lot harder to program a festival with only 70 new international films than one with 150, which we do at Seattle--and 192 at Vancouver. There is not a large, regular film-going community in Palm Springs, as there is in Seattle and Vancouver. In order to gain the cooperation of film industry players--i.e., distributors, producers and directors--we have to concentrate more on providing a launching pad for their films into the American marketplace.

“It helps that Palm Springs is in such close proximity to Hollywood, but ultimately it’s the films themselves that draw motion picture industry and press from all over the world. To create a sense of excitement we’ve got to offer something that isn’t being offered elsewhere.

“Virtually every day we’ll be focusing on one of the vibrant areas of current international filmmaking. . . . Each day, we are celebrating the work of a different country. This is a way for filmgoers to prioritize and select what they want to see. Some people are only interested in premieres or in films from specific countries. Some people are interested in discovering new talent; for them we have our new directors showcase.”

Several important films, such as Akira Kurosawa’s “Rhapsody in August,” Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique,” Peter Chelsom’s “Hear My Song” and Paul Cox’s “A Woman’s Tale” have already been released in Los Angeles, but may well not be shown commercially in Palm Springs. There are many films by new or unknown filmmakers from around the world.

Among the better-known filmmakers are Germany (and America’s) Percy Adlon (“Salmonberries”), France’s Maurice Pialat (“Van Gogh”), Mexico’s Jaime Humberto Hermosillo (“Homework”), Great Britain’s Dennis Potter (“Secret Friends”), Australia’s John Duigan (“Flirting”) and Britain’s Michael Apted (“35 Up”).

Among the U.S. films are: Nicolas Roeg’s “Cold Heaven” with Theresa Russell and Mark Harmon; Jeremy Kagan’s “By the Sword,” with F. Murray Abraham and Eric Roberts; Andrew Lane’s “Lonely Hearts,” also with Eric Roberts and co-starring Beverly D’Angelo; Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala” and Marco Rocco’s “Where the Day Takes You,” starring Lara Flynn Boyle, Dermot Mulroney, Ricki Lake, Adam Baldwin, Laura San Giacomo and others in a story of the lost kids of Hollywood Boulevard. Among the special events will be a black-tie gala in honor of James Stewart and a salute to California film schools.

The festival’s new executive director, David Nicks, who has been involved with the festival since its inception and has worked with Macdonald in Seattle and Vancouver, said that he has been concentrating on generating local support for the festival, which is budgeted at $650,000.

“We’ve had more local support from the community in the last 10 months than from the film industry, although we’ve had increased support from foreign industries,” said Nicks. “This local interest has really started to blossom, and we’ve put a lot of effort into making that happen. We’ve been speaking to community groups, getting community leaders involved, and we’ve held six special events in the past year, screenings of such films as ‘Everybody’s Fine,’ ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’ and ‘Poison,’ along with receptions. We want people to know that there’s something really fun to do here besides laying by the pool.”