Even before the submission deadline for the upcoming New York Film Festival passed last Friday, news was already streaming out of Lincoln Center about special programming for the event’s 45th anniversary celebration. Already unveiled as this year’s opening night selection, Wes Anderson’s anticipated new concoction, “The Darjeeling Limited,” sees the director reuniting with Jason Schwartzman (of “Rushmore” fame) in a story about three brothers trying to bond on a train in India.

Widespread talk at recent press gatherings across the city about Mr. Anderson’s opening night draw has been equaled by talk of the fest’s centerpiece, “No Country for Old Men,” the first truly original Coen Brothers film since 2001, which premiered at Cannes in May. It’s one of three Cannes titles already unveiled for the New York Film Festival, which is scheduled to run from September 28 through October 14, the other two being Cristian Mungiu’s award-winning “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine.”

“It was good news for all of us, I think, that Cannes, the most important festival of them all, had a really strong year,” the NYFF program director, Richard Peña, said before Friday’s submission deadline. “Everyone thought that there were at least four or five top-notch films this year, and another 10 or so really good films. It’s a very good base to start from.”

For Mr. Peña, who chairs the festival’s screening committee, that strong foundation of Cannes titles is essential. Prior to the deadline, he said he expected the number of NYFF submissions this year to top 1,800, each vying for one of the festival’s few slots. Unlike the Tribeca Film Festival, which brought more than 200 features and shorts to the city, the NYFF has always operated with a smaller programming scale (averaging 28 feature films and 12 shorts per year), making the job of the screening committee that much more daunting and critical.

That selectivity is what Mr. Peña believes sets the NYFF apart from so many new festivals that seem to prefer quantity at times to quality. “Really, what distinguishes us from every other festival that might show 300-plus films is that at this festival, you really do have to make a choice,” he said. “To me, one of the sad things that has happened over the last 15 to 20 years is that more festivals have become markets — that the modus operandi for many festivals has been to get bigger and bigger and to become this garage sale of titles. What I always admired about our festival and others is that a small group of people actually selected thefilms. You could disagree wildly with their choices, but someone did choose it, and it wasn’t just hundreds of titles, chosen without any rhyme or reason.”

That said, however, Mr. Peña noted that festivals are “sitespecific” and not “one size fits all,” and that in a city without art houses, perhaps an encyclopedic festival makes sense, as a way of getting titles onto the big screen that would otherwise never reach a particular audience. But in New York, he said, with our plethora of art houses, film festivals, and other cinematic offerings, the demand has never been greater for an event that cuts through the noise and puts together a carefully curated slate of options.

“We have a luxury here, an audience in New York that is informed and discriminating, that we don’t have to play down to,” he said. “We can challenge our audience with the toughest stuff.”

Festival organizers say the full NYFF film schedule will be announced at some point in August, as will the special programming to accompany the films during the festival’s 17-day run. Mr. Peña called special attention to one retrospective he has been working on: resurrecting the work of the Brazillian director Joaquim Pedro de Andrade in hopes of offering a different take on the Brazil of the 1960s and ’70s.

“It’s finally happening, the restoration of these works that have been unseen for years,” he said. “Joaquim’s work will really broaden the understanding of that period in Brazillian history.” The series will include 1969’s “Macunaima,” perhaps the director’s best-known work, which enjoyed a brief resurgence at the 2004 NYFF.

Despite the intensity of the last few months, as his attention has shifted away from Cannes to the thousands of contenders that must be whittled down to a final roster of only a few dozen, Mr. Peña is as excited as ever about the formidable challenge.

“Having a small number of films, they all become like our children in a way,” he said. “In a sense, we really get behind them, and we kind of keep tabs on them. ‘Inland Empire’ is a good example of that,” he said, recalling the drama that surrounded David Lynch’s last-minute addition to last year’s schedule, as the director worked until the very last second preparing the work for its New York premiere. Given the film’s subsequent multi-month stint in the city’s sold-out art houses, it’s going to be a hard act to follow.

ssnyder@nysun.com