Fall brings in a bevy of film festivals that showcase the latest in the medium.

As the sun sets on this year’s summer music festivals (Monterey Americana Fest, First City, Carmel Bach Festival, et al.), overhead lights go down and projector lights go up in the county’s movie houses as film-festival season begins. Here’s what’s coming – to quote a beloved, departed film critic – at the movies.

First, we bid adieu. The Blue Ocean Film Festival just announced that, four years after relocating to Monterey in 2010 and returning in 2012, it’s moving to St. Petersburg in 2014, then, oddly, to Monaco in 2015 in perpetuity (which to the festival seems to mean “for a spell”). But there’s plenty of other film action getting spooled up locally.

Take the Sept. 7 gala finale of the Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series, multiply it by about 300 screens, and you’ve got a crude approximation of what the creators of the Manhattan Short Film Festival are up to. They’ve rounded up 620-plus entries from 48 countries, pared them down to 10, and will screen them simulcast for one week in 300 cities, taking votes from the audience to crown a winning film on Sunday, Oct. 6, at ManhattanShort.com. Peter Keough at The Boston Globe reviewed the films in a Sept. 26 blog. He warns that MSFF’s pieces suffer from formula, but also features breakout numbers like “Kizmet Diner,” “Pale of Settlement” and “Faces.” It plays 4pm and 7pm Thursday, Oct. 3, at Lighthouse Cinemas.

You might already know about the film festival portion of the Philip Glass Days and Nights Festival getting bigger, broader and brawnier with its partnership with CSU Monterey Bay Film Society: Hope you didn’t miss Godfrey Reggio on Tuesday and Wednesday – he’s been in town screening Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. But if you did, there’s more film festival stuff happening 1pm and 3pm Friday and Saturday, Oct. 4-5, at Sunset Center’s Studio 105. Saturday’s 3pm feature documentary is William and the Windmill, which is a complex and timely look at how privileged Westerners foist their beneficence on a poor person from Africa. It’s deceptively challenging stuff; plus, the director will be there to talk.

The Met: Live in HD season is back. Opera lovers rejoice; everyone else, carry on. It’s an opera event, sure, but this could not happen without the medium of film and its attendant technology. This is an Emmy – and Peabody-award winning series simulcast live via high-definition satellite from the Metropolitan Opera in New York’s Lincoln Center to movie screens across the world. Everyone is doing these live simulcasts, primarily with NCM Fathom and Specticast, from comedians to musicians to museums. But the Met wins the audiences and the awards because it’s done with smarts, devotion to detail, and lush image and sound. Its 2013-14 simulcast season begins live this Saturday at 9:55am (ah, there’s a catch) with an encore Wednesday at 6:30pm (ah, there’s a reprieve) at Century Cinemas at Del Monte Center, with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

The Carmel Art & Film Festival is back for its sixth year Oct. 10-13, as fun as it is bewildering. It’s been light on art – its banner artist this year is George Rodrigue of the ubiquitous “Blue Dog” – but they screen more films than the other local film festivals or series (though a lot of them are short films). In the past, its bunches of screenings have been held together by the moxie of bunches of volunteers, sometimes teens, in a motley style, making it a suspenseful experience trying to figure out if a filmmaker will be present, or when and where a film is going to screen (in 2011 they used Twitter to update people on changes). But when it gets it right, the festival delivers memorable live scenes and film moments.

The Museum of Monterey keeps on rolling. They’ve even got a Horror Film Series, curated by resident filmmaker Fred Nelson, which follows last month’s Film Noir Series, in the cozy, 90-seat theater. They’ve already screened Hitchcock’s The Birds; next they project Ingmar Bergman’s surreal Hour of the World (a master of the medium, usually worth watching) 6pm Tuesday, Oct. 8, and Kuroneko, a 1968 Japanese horror movie that might have done well in Cannes were it not for a massive French proletariat uprising that held the country in limbo – even its fancy film festivals.

It’s the lengthiest-running film series here. Meet Malcom at the Movies, at Carl Cherry Center, began Jan. 23 and will run to Dec. 18 – a year-long “festival” in which film buff Malcom Weintraub shares his love of top-flight films and film talk once a month. The next one is Ridley Scott’s 1982 future-punk-sci-fi-noir masterpiece Blade Runner on Oct. 23.

It doesn’t get here until Nov. 1-3, but its arrival grabs the attention of film lovers and geo-politics watchers alike. That’s owing to the weight and gravity of the documentary films of the 14th Annual International Film Festival at Golden State Theatre, presented by the Monterey Bay Chapter of the United Nations Association. Its aim is no less than to “wake up, educate and sometimes mobilize viewers” around global issues. And if you were sitting in on Benghazi Rising in 2011, a documentary about oppressed Libyan citizens who rise up and defy their own defunct government, you know that this festival means what it says.