Two years ago the American Black Film Festival bade its South Beach home bye-bye and hightailed it to California.

''Our attendance had grown tremendously during our five years in Miami, but I felt we were missing a connection with mainstream Hollywood,'' says Jeff Friday, founder and CEO of Film Life, which runs the festival. ``We were perceived as a vacation, and, to be honest, we've worked too hard and launched the careers of too many people to be categorized as a social event.''

But once Friday got the festival to Hollywood, ''I realized we were already connected to the Hollywood community,'' he says. ``The people who characterized us as a social event didn't care about us, anyway. The people who had supported us for the past 12 years valued the festival more when it was in Miami because our secret sauce was that we were a destination event. That's what made us stick out.''

So for its 13th edition, which runs Wednesday through Sunday, ABFF returns to Miami with several changes.

For the first time, the public can buy individual $12 tickets for screenings, instead of having to pay several hundred dollars for an all-access industry pass.

South Florida residents will receive a 25 percent discount on tickets for all events except parties, thanks to subsidies from the city of Miami Beach and the Miami Community Redevelopment Agency.

And instead of having to wade through dozens of movies, film buffs can choose from a slate of 14 feature-length films and documentaries and a program of five short films handpicked from more than 400 submissions.

The rest of the festival's template remains the same, including three ''Master Class with . . .'' seminars featuring Hollywood bigshots John Singleton, Robert Townsend and Gregory Allen Howard (screenwriter of Ali and Remember the Titans). Gala screenings include the regional premieres of Black Dynamite, the action-comedy about the life and times of a 1970s blaxploitation film star (played by Michael Jai White) that wowed Sundance audiences in January, and the documentary Why We Laugh: Black Comedians on Black Comedy, with a cast that includes Bill Cosby, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock and Damon Wayans.

Friday says the slimming down was dictated by industry economics. During the festival's first five years in Acapulco, and then in Miami, ''all the major studios and smaller distributors were chomping at the bit, trying to buy films,'' he says. ``In 2000, DVD sales hit $20 billion. There was a lot of shelf space in Blockbuster and Wal-Mart that needed to be filled.''

But over the past couple of years, DVD sales have stagnated, and the closing of major national retailers like Circuit City means independently produced films have a harder time earning a buck in the home-video arena.

''Circuit City was number three in DVD sales, after Wal-Mart and Target,'' Friday says. ``So independent titles are in a really bad place right now. Now, when you're dealing with these under-a-million-dollar movies, you can't even put them out on DVD anymore. As a filmmaker, you have to really bring it now. And that's why we've retooled our whole program and raised the bar . . . higher than it's ever been.''

The dwindling of potential distribution routes for small, independent movies means the festival plays an even more critical role now in the careers of some filmmakers. Director Derrick Anthony, whose 14-minute short film Popous Pane and the Kids He Loves to Hate is one of five entries vying for a $20,000 prize in the HBO-sponsored Short Film Competition, attended the event for three years before summoning the courage to give his dreams a shot.

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