Film takes center stage for much of the fifth annual Philip Glass Days and Nights Festival.

If you can – if it hasn’t sold out – get your ticket to composer Philip Glass’ Sunday 1pm concert, The Complete Etudes, at Henry Miller Memorial Library. It’s an intimate afternoon of Glass and his piano on the Henry Miller lawn under Big Sur sunshine, a rare chance to see pianists Maki Namekawa, Timo Andres and Glass himself play all 20 of his solo piano etudes, which are like his musical sensibilities distilled into sparkling little pieces.

“It’s a way of thinking about piano music, and my own way of playing piano,” Glass says. Pay special attention to #2, a gorgeous, wavy piece of music you’ll never want to stop.

And, of course, Friday’s 8pm show, Philip and Friends, is likely going to be a rollicking time at Henry Miller, jammed with super-talented friends like poet Jerry Quickley, harpist Lavinia Meijer, kora player Foday Musa Susa, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and violist David Harding.

“I might start with Foday,” Glass says. “Because Jerry’s a hard act to follow. He gets steamed up.”

Film has always been a part of the festival, now in its fifth year, and Glass is a big proponent of the more substantial and experimental examples from the medium. But this time, films are everywhere.

Sundance Film Festival short films programmer Mike Plante, a longtime friend of the film program at CSU Monterey Bay (disclosure: my wife Enid Baxter Ryce is the chair), returns to the Peninsula as he always does, bearing gifts for film students and the public, like a doting uncle. He’ll open the festival by showing six Sundance award-winning short films 12pm Thursday, Sept. 24, at CSUMB’s Cinematic Arts studio.

That’s a bunch of the most innovative stuff happening in film right now.

The program will run 85 minutes, comprising the award winners from the 2015 Sundance fest, including the top-prize winner, an animated short by Don Hertzfeldt that Plante says is among the famed animator’s best work.

“Each year we take these shorts on tours to different communities so film fans around the U.S. can see them outside of the Sundance Festival,” Plante writes in an email. “There is wild comedy, somber drama, touching real life stories.”

On Saturday, Sept. 26, Glass and filmmaker and longtime collaborator Godfrey Reggio were going to screen Naqoyqatsi, the third in the influential and groundbreaking Qatsi triology (the first two, Koyaanisqatsi and Powaaqatsi, have been shown in previous years of the festival). It was to happen at Golden State Theatre, which the festival had not employed before, and be scored live by Glass and his Philip Glass Ensemble.

But it’s been cancelled, purportedly due to poor ticket sales. Which is a shame. Roughly translated from the Hopi language as “Life as War,” the film attempts to convey the complexity of technology and how it changes our relationship with nature and ourselves.

“I saw where he was going with the images,” Glass says, “so I went with a live orchestra, a very romantic score. The austere images and romantic score go together. The music added a warmth. We can shadowbox each other at this point.”

Last year’s festival featured headliner names like radio star Ira Glass and particle physicist Brian Greene, names that can drive ticket sales. Naqoyqatsi is maybe the least popular of the Qatsi trilogy, though the Philip Glass Ensemble can play the hell out of his scores. Audiences will have to take that on faith.

But the cancellation may be tempered by the festival’s outreach to kids and families in the children’s workshop, an event started last year that lent the entire avant-garde festival a more approachable side.

This year, that workshop migrates over to Monterey, at the Monterey Museum of Art on Pacific Street, 2-4pm Saturday, in a frenzy of hands-on art, music and animation with animator Soyeon Kim and her team.

Mike Plante isn’t the only major film presence left standing in the festival.

At last year’s Days and Nights Festival, a documentary was screened at the Sunset Center’s Studio 105 basement space. It was called H2OMX – as in “water” and “Mexico” – about the constricting water problems taxing the people and the infrastructure of Mexico City. This film, in powerfully patient and engrossing cinematography and interviews, shows us the cusp of the crisis.

H2OMX came from a 10-year-old documentary festival out of Mexico called Ambulante, founded by Y Tu Mamá Tambíen co-stars Gael Garcia Bernal (Amores Perros, Babel) and Diego Luna (Milk, director of Cesar Chavez), as well as Pablo Cruz and Elena Fortes.

Ambulante has a mission, to show socially and politically urgent documentaries in communities for free, to educate and agitate, inspire greater self-determination, shine that cleansing and revealing light of the camera. Last year they launched Ambulante California, screening their films for free in outdoor venues around Los Angeles.

This year they expand, bringing their films, and their mission, into the heart of the Central Coast – Seaside, Castroville, Greenfield and Watsonville – via the Days and Nights Festival and its community programs curator Baxter Ryce.

Like the Sundance short films, Ambulante’s portfolio of international docs show forerunners of the genre.

“I definitely see documentaries subverting expectations, taking more risks, having more fiction narrative aesthetics,” says Christine Davila, director of Ambulante California. “There are more genres within the documentary form.”

She describes the atmosphere at these free outdoor community screenings as “magical.”

“Every time a film is shown to a new and different audience, that film is born again,” she says. “Every space that Ambulante inhabits, it takes on that [magical] vibe. It’s organic. We attract both the young hipster curious adventurers of cultural happenings, as well as young families and Spanish speaking folks.”

Like H2OMX, the three Spanish-language films and their directors, who will speak at all the screenings might inform what is happening in California.

They are El Patio de mi Casa (No Place Like Home), playing 7pm Friday, Sept. 25, at Castroville Public Library, wherein filmmaker Carlos Hagerman focuses on his parents’ work in education in indigenous communities in Mexico.

Llévate Mis Amores (All of Me) plays 7pm Tuesday, Sept. 29, at Greenfield Cultural Arts Center, as well as 7pm Wednesday, Sept. 30, at the Mello Center for the Performing Arts in Watsonville. The film is about women who live in the Mexican village of La Patrona who bundle up food and water for the migrants making the treacherous journey to America riding on a freight train they call La Bestia – The Beast.

Los Reyes del Pueblo Que no Existe, translated as Kings of Nowhere (7pm Monday, Sept. 28, at CSUMB Cinematic Arts), is Betzabe Garcia’s debut documentary feature that quietly observes three families who live in a surreal and perpetually watery Mexican town that gets flooded every year due to the construction of a dam.

“I think [Ambulante] has been a great collaboration,” Philip Glass chimes in. “There are filmmakers who are like poets. Their films are not commercial, but they’re authentic, they have an aesthetic.”

And Glass, a composer with 40-something film scores to his credit, knows and respects the art form as much as anyone. In hosting Ambulante and Sundance in his festival, he reinforces film as the people’s medium.

THE DAYS AND NIGHTS FESTIVAL happens Sept. 24-30 in various locations throughout Monterey County. www.PhilipGlassCenter.org/2015-festival.