The stature of the Palm Springs International Film Festival — and Palm Springs — continues to grow as the festival begins its final day today.

Bijan Tehrani, editor-in-chief of the widely respected film festival Web site Cinema Without Borders, said Sunday it has become more important than the Sundance Film Festival in Utah for independent and foreign film because Sundance has become “a part of Hollywood cinema.”

“This is one of the most important festivals of international cinema because it has great coverage of international cinema and gives great chances for international filmmakers to have a voice here,” Tehrani said after presenting the Israeli Golden Globe winner, “Waltz With Bashir,” the festival's Bridging the Borders Award.

“I think the home of international cinema is Palm Springs and the Palm Springs International Film Festival.”

The festival set a revenue record at its Jan. 6 celebrity awards gala honoring the likes of Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn. Executive Director Darryl Macdonald said the festival also will break box office records and crush last year's attendance record of 125,988.

“We hit what we did last year some time on Friday,” said Macdonald, who instituted new reserved tickets to generate even more revenue.

He measures the success of a festival by audience response and said, “Universally, everyone has raved about this year's festival. They say how it gets better and better, but this year is the best year ever.”

Dave Strachan of Alamogordo, N.M, echoed that after seeing 38 films by Sunday.

“The quality is just unbelievable,” he said. “It's very well-run. They had so many hundreds of people to deal with every few minutes and it goes like clockwork.”

“We came last year for the first time and got hooked,” said Marie Batten of Bedford, Va., which is the subject of a festival documentary — “Bedford: The Town They Left Behind” — that she and her husband raved about.

They saw three to four films a day, and she said, “We've enjoyed — really enjoyed — all but two of the selections we've made.”

In a year with more American independents than any year in which Macdonald has programmed the festival, the audience showed its acceptance of subtitled films by making its favorite narrative feature announced Sunday the light-hearted, exquisitely made Japanese film, “Departures,” by Yojiro Takita.

DST Studios in Palm Springs, recently renovated for film and television work, was the scene of the awards luncheon that also saw an audience favorite award go to a documentary on the father of modern architectural photography, “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman,” by Eric Bricker.

Awards also were announced recognizing a best foreign language film (“Revanche”) by the FIPRESCI international critics society, and new filmmakers through the New Voices/New Visions competition and the John Schlesinger Award. Individuals involved with those selections also raved about the festival.

Maria Dinulescu, star of the Romanian/French film “Hooked,” which won the New Voices/New Visions contest, said the festival was as rewarding for her as a filmgoer as she hopes it will be for the film as it seeks a distributor.

“I'm traveling to many film festivals, but here, I can see more than 10 films; very unusual,” she said. “It's unbelievable the people (who attend). You can have such beautiful Q&As. You can speak with them and go to lunch with them. They're just wonderful.”

Michael Kananack, a vice president of Neoclassics Films Ltd. who served on the New Voices/New Visions panel, said the festival has “no weaknesses.

“You get the best of the year, plus new discoveries,” he said. “It is a great gauge of older audiences, because they are not the typical overenthusiastic festival crowd that will go crazy over anything exposed on film.”

Marc Halperin of Magic Lamp Releasing, who has attended 19 of the 20 Palm Springs festivals, said, “It really has become one of the top film festivals in the world.”