The 7th Annual San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival (the 3rd i) covers a large swath of subjects affecting people of this turbulent region centered around the Indian subcontinent. Kicking off Thursday and Friday at the Roxie Cinema, the festival concludes Saturday and Sunday at the Castro Theatre.

Searching for Sandeep Australian Poppy Stockwell is pushing a luggage cart through the wrong terminal of the Bangkok International Airport. Affable, blonde and butch, Poppy has spent the decade since coming out in her native Sydney trying to hook up with the wrong sort of woman. "I've been out with a lot of women who are bisexual or curious, and I don't want to be with women like that anymore – it's just heartbreaking, ends in tears!"

Poppy's solution to the dating game, as described in this breezy, intimate video diary, is to pluck her dream girl, sight unseen, off the World Wide Web, work up a proper texting, cell-phone chat relationship, then put the whole thing to a test in a neutral country.

The Sandeep of the title turns out to be a proper English/Indian woman: 31, still living at home (in a far suburb of London) with four sisters, a brother and parents who haven't a clue that she's gay. "She seems a bit sheltered, she's never experimented with drugs, she hasn't had any sexual partners, she's not out to anybody, and I feel like that's a really big responsibility for me – the thought of it is just a bit exhausting. Hopefully she won't find me too butch, which is what I'm really worried about!"

The airport meet proceeds without a hitch, but the real challenge lies in Sandeep's screwing up her courage to bring the reality of Poppy home to her very traditional parents.

The video-diary technique allows us to penetrate the cultural boundaries and personal eccentricities that can be deal-breakers in any potential relationship. Poppy's chatty, tell-all style is particularly spot-on when it comes to describing the women's big sexual experience gap.

"I don't think she's ever masturbated. She hasn't ever had an orgasm. So I've been encouraging her to do some homework masturbating. I thought it might be better for her and for me, for my sexual satisfaction for her to learn how to make herself cum. She told me she tried it, and she got bored. I think she feels guilty touching herself, giving herself pleasure like that. So on the phone just now, I asked her to put her hands down her pants, and she did. And that's a connection between us – it's beautiful." Searching for Sandeep plays with the short Mr. and Mrs. Singh. (Castro, 11/7)

Warrior Boyz He's a tall, skinny kid, with a sly, infectious smile, oddly camera-shy. You have to look closely to see the scars barely visible through his closely cropped hair. His guidance counselor is worried about Tanvir, not that he'll graduate, he's 15 and in the 10th grade, but that he'll even be alive by the time he's 18. If he lived in Hollywood, this strangely charismatic kid might have an agent, be booked as a sexy, naughty kid on a Disney Channel teen show. As it is, Tanvir is barely hanging on at the Princess Margaret Secondary School, a prestigious academy in Surrey, the second-largest city in British Columbia, and home to 200,000 Indo-Canadians.

In Warrior Boyz, writer/director Baljit Sangra discovers that a once-sleepy Vancouver suburb now has a gang problem rivaling that of Oakland. Like Tanvir, most of his subjects are brown-skinned, often demure-appearing boys you'd never think were spending their off-school hours carrying machetes and aluminum baseball bats. Tanvir, who's been kicked out of his home and suspended from school innumerable times, claims the reason he got his skinny body into a gang was to earn respect. "You just have to be loyal for people to respect you. Like, if one of my friends is going to get jumped, stay and get jumped with him. Last week, me and my buddies hospitalized three older guys."

This candid doc may astonish you with its unsettling picture of a violent subculture that sprung up in what we've come to view as our politically correct neighbor to the north. The director will appear for a Q&A. (Roxie, 11/6)

Bombay Summer First-time fiction filmmaker Joseph Mathew delivers a sensual and moving account of a tragic friendship among three young people in this non-Bollywood take on a languid summer in India's bustling capital. Geeta (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is a young careerwoman who's pursuing what she believes is a discreet affair with a struggling, unmarried poet, Jaidev (Samrat Chakrabarti) while still living at home with her puritanical father and bookworm teenage brother. Suddenly her cover is blown by the sudden appearance of a poor but beautiful young photographer, Madan (Jatin Goswami). The trio starts to hang together despite obvious differences in life goals and temperament. Soon it becomes apparent that Madan's shadow life as a drug courier will fatally complicate relationships that have gotten a bit too Western for this still-traditional society. American director Mathew (whose work includes docs on illegal immigration and a famous old ballpark in Baltimore) has an intuitive feel for the rhythms of both respectable and shady lives in a nation just beginning to adjust to the mantra that money doesn't just talk, it swears. Director Mathew will be present for the screening. (Castro, 11/7)

Info: www.thirdi.org/festival.