WOODSTOCK - Bob Dylan was here in the '60s.

He played music in the cafe at night, wrote songs, tomfooled with his young kids, tooled around (disastrously) on his motorcycle and took shelter from the pressures of fame.

Dylan left Woodstock long ago, but the Catskill Mountain village never forgot its famous resident. The five-day Woodstock Film Festival celebrates the Dylan link when it opens Wednesday. The quirky Dylan biopic “I'm Not There” will be featured and a local gallery will exhibit photos by Elliot Landy of Dylan in Woodstock.

“It takes Bob Dylan's history with Woodstock and connects it to the present,” said festival director Meira Blaustein.

Dylan began visiting here in 1963 - well before the landmark 1969 concert held 50 miles away that borrowed the Woodstock name. Even before the concert, Woodstock had been a haven for left-of-center types thanks to the old Byrdcliffe artists' colony.

Dylan stayed with folkie friend Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul and Mary) in the summer of '63 and later logged a lot of time in a house owned by his manager, Albert Grossman. Joan Baez recalls in “Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades” watching Dylan at Grossman's house typing away, standing up, while smoking and drinking red wine.

Dylan later stayed for several months in a room above the Cafe Espresso, where proprietor Mary Lou Paturel remembers her guest was always busy doing something, be it singing, writing or reading.

“It would be sweet,” she said “He'd be upstairs, he'd write a song. We'd be downstairs ... he'd come down and excuse himself and ask if he could play this song he just wrote.”

The seminal date in Dylan-at-Woodstock lore is July 29, 1966, the day he injured himself in a motorcycle crash. Details of the crash and the extent of Dylan's injuries are debated. Dylan has said he hit the brakes too hard that morning while cresting a hill and being blinded by the sun. Whatever the case, the quiet convalescence that followed is seen as marking a new phase in his career.

The Woodstock Film Festival will close Oct. 14 with a screening of “I'm Not There,” a Dylan biography that has already shown in some larger festivals and is slated for domestic release Nov. 21.

Taking a cue from the nonlinear imagery in Dylan's songs, director Todd Haynes cast six actors to play Dylan in different periods of his life. Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger are among the movie's Dylans.

“I would never try to fit Dylan into this sort of one-size-fits-all box of traditional biopic,” Haynes said.

Landy's photographs will be on display during the festival in exhibit called “Dylan: The Woodstock Years.” Though Dylan had sometimes prickly dealings with the press, he seemed to warm to Landy, who first shot Dylan in 1968 for The Saturday Evening Post. Landy recalls expecting to meet the moody musician he had seen in a movie.

“I had seen ‘Don't Look Back' and he looked so surly and unfriendly,” Landy recalled. “And to me he was the nicest guy. He was funny.”

Landy's most famous Dylan shot might be the album cover for “Nashville Skyline,” which shows a smiling Dylan looking down at the camera over his acoustic guitar, touching his hat brim. But Landy also took rolls of candid shots of Dylan, his wife Sara and his children in 1968 and 1970. Dylan plays with his kids on a trampoline in one shot and does a headstand in another.

Dylan is long gone from Woodstock (though he was scheduled to come within 50 miles of Woodstock Saturday for a concert at Albany). Settling for the next best thing, festival organizers are rounding out their homage with a Dylan lookalike contest.

Paturel will be a judge.

The festival runs Oct. 10-14 has plenty of non-Dylan offerings, too. Among the more than 120 films being screened will be the opener, Julian Schnabel's “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and “Lars and the Real Girl” with Ryan Gosling.

Keeping with the Woodstock countercultural philosophy, the festival will premiere “Neal Cassady,” a drama about the man who inspired Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's “On the Road.”