This year marks the 3rd Annual Asheville Film Festival, which will feature a host of provocative and fascinating feature, documentary, short, animation and student films, 16 of which are filmed in North Carolina.

“The Great American Quilt Revival,” a documentary produced by Asheville’s Paul Bonesteel was one of the highlights at this year’s Highlands International Film Festival in August. The film project began when Georgia Bonesteel, Paul’s mother, and a quilter long known for her North Carolina Public Television show on quilting, was inducted to the Quilters Hall of Fame in Marion, Indiana. Bonesteel promised the audience there that her son Paul would come up and interview some of the big names in quilting — an idea Paul didn’t really understand.

“This one was really a struggle because I didn’t know what the story was,” Bonesteel said.

Bonesteel has been steadily earning a reputation as a talented documentary producer with credits like “Folkmoot USA,” an Emmy-nominated film about the annual international dance festival based in Waynesville, and “The Mystery of George Masa,” which earned praise for its portrait of the Japanese-American photographer and hiker who helped promote and trail blaze the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and North Carolina’s section of the Appalachian Trail.

With “The Great American Quilt Revival” Bonesteel tackled a project with deep roots in American history. How could a film encompass so many quilting patterns and the quilting histories of each region? Who else would need to be interviewed to make sure the documentary was covering its bases? What about the controversial issues such as the idea that quilts were used as symbols to help slaves get through the Underground Railroad or the modern-day stitching machines that produce quilts in a fraction of the time traditional hand-stitching takes? And how could the film appeal to quilters and non-quilters alike?

“It’s crazy how complicated it is,” Bonesteel said. “These are the things that had me frozen in fear.”

Also featured is the student film “Madison County Project,” which focuses on the custom of unaccompanied ballad singing in Madison County, and how the works of documentary filmmakers, photographers, and academics have influenced that tradition. One photographer who has played a role in the preservation of oral traditions is Rob Amberg, a native of suburban Washington, D.C., who has lived in rural, mountainous Madison County for 31 years. Shortly after his arrival in the area, Amberg was befriended by Dellie Norton and her family, lifelong residents of the small community of Sodom Laurel. Remarkable for their musical talent, Norton’s family are small tobacco farmers who have eked out a living in Sodom Laurel since the early 19th century. Amberg created a photographic portrait of a family, and by extension, a community, capturing the heart of rural America beset by a rapidly evolving world.

Asheville-based filmmaker Rod Murphy screens his documentary “Rank Strangers,” the story of Nelia Hyatt’s Opry House, at 4:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28 and 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29.

Hyatt’s home on Brevard Road in south Asheville is host to an informal gathering of bluegrass and traditional musicians that began more than 50 years ago.

The story goes that Nelia, originally from Andrews, was visiting her aunt on Balsam Mountain when a local boy who had borrowed a gun to go hunting, came to return it. The borrowed gun sparked a year-long courtship and finally the two were married.

During the war, Mr. Hyatt got a job working in the shipyards — a job he wanted to keep, but his father convinced him otherwise. Instead, Hyatt’s father said he should come back and take on with the railroad.

Hyatt began his railroad job down in South Carolina, calling his friends to get together for jam sessions whenever he came home. These sessions marked the start of what would later become the longest running bluegrass jam in the state; however, that tradition is now threatened by N.C. Department of Transportation plans to widen Interstate 26, which runs nearby. Road expansion would destroy Hyatt’s home.

“Rank Strangers” is not a competition film.

For more information about the Asheville Film Festival and a complete schedule visit www.ashevillefilmfestival.com.