While prepping and selecting for the second annual Cinema Arts Festival Houston, which kicks off Wednesday for a five-day run, artistic director Richard Herskowitz set out to offer an encore performance that would expand on last year’s success story.

As he approaches opening night, he’s feeling pretty confident about his prospects for making lightning strike twice. And he knows that, with Isabella Rossellini, John Turturro and Shirley MacLaine as featured attraction, he’s already managed to triple the festival’s star power.

“Clearly,” Herskowitz says, “after we were able last year to feature a great actor like Tilda Swinton — almost immediately, my idea was to go after Isabella Rossellini. Because I knew we would be able to treat her the same way we did with Swinton — three-dimensionally.

“In Swinton’s case, we were able to showcase her not just as an actor, but also as a collaborator of the great Derek Jarman, and as someone who is a great connoisseur and a great festival programmer herself. I’ve found that actors really respond to that.

“And I thought I could do the same thing with Isabella Rossellini — by looking at her work, and also looking at it in relationship to the work of her father,” famed Italian Neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. “And she responded, favorably, because it was an original request.”

It helped, of course, that Isabella Rossellini knew of her father’s involvement with the founding of the Rice Media Center in the early 1970s. It helped even more that Herskowitz was able to track down a print of Underwater Fantasy (1938), Roberto Rossellini’s sophomore directorial effort, a 10-minute short featuring undersea creatures filmed through an aquarium.

“Isabella loved this,” Herskowitz says, “because it resonates so well with some of her own work,” including Green Porno and Seduce Me, Sundance Channel productions that find her decked out in wild costumes while performing the reproductive practices of fish and insects.

(If you’re curious about the latter — and, really, how could you not be? — they’ll be part of the program during An Evening with Isabella Rossellini, at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.)

“I’ve always been determined,” Herskowitz says, “that the Cinema Arts Festival would not just be a place where people would come to showcase their latest work — because they do that all the time, at other festivals.”

In the case of John Turturro, “I’ve asked him to show things that are really close to his heart, two documentaries on Italian culture” — Passione (7 p.m. Wednesday at MFAH) and Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy (4 p.m. Thursday at MFAH) — “that he’s been involved with over the past couple years," Herskowitz says. "I knew he’d respond more enthusiastically to introducing that as opposed to, say, the latest Transformers film.”

Shirley MacLaine personally selected Terms of Endearment — reportedly her favorite among her many films — for screening during a program honoring her at 7 p.m. Saturday at MFAH. It’s an apt choice, seeing as this 1983 filmed-in-Houston drama gave MacLaine the role of a lifetime — River Oaks grande dame Aurora Greenway — which she played to Oscar-worthy perfection.

“To be honest,” Herskowitz admits, “I might have preferred to show something else. Like maybe Some Came Running. But MacLaine insisted we show Terms of Endearment — and then agreed she’d talk about all her other films during an on-stage conversation after the screening.”

Other luminaries expected for the 2010 Cinema Arts Festival Houston include independent animator Bill Plympton, award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney — and, believe it or not, Houston rodeo champion Clint Cannon.

“I don’t pretend to know anything about rodeo at all,” Herskowitz says. “But initially, somebody on my board told me that they knew the French filmmaker Frederic Laffont, and that he would be working on a project in the Texas area. And then, while tracking him down, I found that he had made this documentary about Clint Cannon, Ballad for a Cowboy, and was working on another film with him called Cowboy Solitude.

“And when I found out who Clint Cannon was, it was like, Holy smoke! Here is the guy who is, like, this really big deal in the rodeo world, and he’s been making these really interesting films with this French filmmaker.”

(Ballad of a Cowboy will be shown, along with a work-in-progress segment of Cowboy Solitude, at 9:45 p.m. Saturday at the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace Stadium 24. Cannon and Laffont will be on hand for a post-screening Q&A.)

Other 2010 Cinema Arts Festival Houston offerings run the gamut from David Hillman Curtis’ Ride, Rise, Roar (9:45 p.m. Saturday and 6:45 p.m. Sunday at the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace), an exhilarating music-dance performance film featuring ex-Talking Heads front man David Byrne, to Mark Landsman’s Thunder Soul, the acclaimed documentary about Houston’s very own Kashmire High jazz stage band of the 1970s, which will be presented during a free-admission, multi-media program at 6:45 p.m. Thursday at Discovery Green.

The opening-night attraction: Rabbit Hole (7 p.m. Wednesday at the Edwards Greenway Grand Palace), James Cameron Mitchell’s film of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart.

“Right from the start,” Herskowitz says, “I felt like this festival should be really distinct from WorldFest/Houston. Theirs is kind of a broad premiere festival, with awards. This should be more curatorially focused. And you know what? I may have been a little selfish in saying that, because that’s what I like to do. I had come here from the Virginia Film Festival, and for the previous 14, 15 years — every year, we had a theme. Animal attractions. Money. Cool. Wet. And my programs were always shaped and designed to be a kind of mega-film made up from a lot of films that related to each other.

“Here, I didn’t want to do anything as confining. But the original task force that brought the festival together was a kind of coalition of all these different arts organizations. And they kept saying to me, ‘The world doesn’t know what an incredible arts city this is, and what incredible arts institutions we have collectively.’ So right from the start, there was the idea that we should really focus on the arts. All the arts.”

Does he see the event eventually expanding? Maybe. But probably not.

“I think it’s just the right shape and size now,” Herskowitz says. “It’s not going to evolve in to a broad, open-call premiere festival. WorldFest/Houston does that just fine. This festival, as I say, will have a more curatorial focus. Of course, being curatorial means you can still be quite flexible.

"I mean, I’m sure some people would argue with the notion that rodeo can be an art form, but…”