As you probably noticed from our first review this morning, the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival is now underway in Silver Spring, Md. The festival runs beginning today through Monday, June 23, and presents 108 documentary films over the course of the week. Now in its sixth year, SILVERDOCS is by far and away the classiest and best run film festival the D.C. metro area has to offer, and DCist will be crawling all over the Downtown Silver Spring complex over the next several days to bring you our best bets for what you shouldn’t miss.

As you peruse this year’s schedule, keep a few things in mind.

• Don’t Fear the Stand-By Lines: All of the hot tickets for the festival, especially any of the primetime evening slots for films in U.S. or International Competition, will sell out. But at SILVERDOCS, “sold out” means a lot of passholders snagged tickets before you got the chance, and plenty of them won’t show up. In our experience at past festivals, if you show up 45 minutes before a film is set to begin, you can almost always get a good enough spot in the stand-by line to be admitted to your screening.
• Plan Ahead: You can also, of course, purchase a pass of your very own. The best deal for docuphiles is not cheap ($275 for the Silver Film Buff Pass; $125 for students with ID), but if you can take a couple days off of work to watch non-stop films in the middle of the day, it would definitely be worth the cost. Passes are only available for purchase at this point in person at the registration desk in the Lee Building at the corner of Colesville and Georgia. Individual tickets are available at the box office at the AFI Silver Theater.
• Get There for Happy Hour: Attending any film festival can be a rewarding experience in many ways, but often not on your pocketbook. At SILVERDOCS, you’re heading out to Silver Spring anyway, so you’ll probably want to grab a meal while you’re there. Do yourself a favor and get on the Metro early enough to eat during happy hour in Downtown Silver Spring, as opposed to after your movie. Many, many of the restaurants adjacent to the festival are offering insanely cheap happy hour deals for ticketholders, as well as just in general to entice festivalgoers. Jackie’s Restaurant is doing $2 off drinks and a $4 bar menu every night from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., Austin Grill does happy hour from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. every day, and yesterday at around 6 p.m. I had a beer and a huge chicken quesadilla at Eggspectation (who knew?) for a little over $6. There are about fifty zillion other, better restaurants here too, and all of them seem to be big on happy hour.
• Try A Film You Wouldn’t Normally See: We’ve only seen a fraction of the films on offer this year, but at this point, we have a pretty strong inclination to have faith enough in SILVERDOCS programming to venture that you’re not going to absolutely hate anything they’re serving up. It’s a film festival — it’s time to be adventurous.
• Stay for the Q&A: Yeah, we know, Q&A’s can often be awkward. The people who get up to ask questions first are invariably the ones who just want to hear the sound of their own voices. But festivals like these provide unique opportunities to hear a little bit more about how a documentary came about, straight from the director’s mouth, and it’s worth staying for that extra 15 minutes to complete your experience.

Check out the full slate of SILVERDOCS films over here.