Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said, "The cinema is truth at 24 frames per second," making slow-mo sports replays and sped-up Benny Hill gags nothing but cruel, cruel lies. Get the real deal with today's Groupon: for $25, you get admission to 10 regular film screenings and panel discussions at the Dallas International Film Festival on Mockingbird Lane, from Thursday, March 31 through Sunday, April 10 (a $50 value).

Touted by MovieMaker magazine as one of the 25 Festivals Worth The Entry Fee, the cinematically encompassing Dallas International Film Festival trawls the globe for future Oscar winners, modern cult classics, and tomorrow’s indie-darlings. This year boasts another stellar collection of silver-screen overload, with more than 380 full-length films and a surplus of 420 short films from local and international filmmakers. With a fistful of 10 passes, cineastes can indulge their senses in 2011’s stampede of cinema, carefully culled from more than 6,000 submissions.

Choose from 812 films, representing 49 countries and thousands of visionaries with maxed-out credit cards. The fest’s first 12 official selections cross genres and international waters with flicks including Elevate, a documentary chronicling four vertically-gifted Senegalese basketball players navigating the American sports-scape, and Mumbai Diaries, wherein intersecting lives meet at perpendicular angles in India’s largest metropolis. The DIFF’s passionate curators also foreground Lone Star-centric eye feasts, including the wild mustang-focused documentary Wild Horse, Wild Ride and Rainbows End, a comedy about eastern Texans and their merciless thirst for shiny precious metals. Previous festivals have given lucky moviegoers sneak peeks of acclaimed titles such as the award-winning films Winter’s Bone and The Hurt Locker months before the rest of the world, giving audiences exclusive spoiler privileges, and forcing them to suppress the urge to shout, “Kevin Spacey was the Locker!”

Passes can be shared with friends and family, with a maximum of four tickets per film screening. Passes are also good for panel discussions with top critics and film intelligentsia. More than 684 filmmakers will be in attendance, fielding questions such as, “Can I be in your next movie?” and “I said, ‘Can I be in your next movie?’”

Tickets are not valid for centerpiece screenings.

Reviews

Moviefone featured the 2010 Dallas International Film Festival. More than 5,000 Facebookers like the festival, and more than 6,000 Facebookers like the Dallas Film Society.

• In some ways, the DALLAS International Film Festival, run by the DALLAS Film Society and formerly prefixed with the "AFI" brand, felt very much like a Dallas affair. Granted, this was my first ever visit… but suffice to say the Dallas fest is a well-appointed deal seemingly run by sheer inborn hospitality, enthusiasm for film, and blessedly deep pockets. – Jen Yamato, Moviefone