By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON, May 17 (Reuters) - Filmmaker Jonathan Demme, an Oscar winner for the drama "The Silence of the Lambs," will be honored for his nonfiction movies and screen a new film about a hurricane-wracked New Orleans neighborhood at this year's Silverdocs documentary festival, organizers said on Thursday.

Demme's documentaries include the landmark Talking Heads concert film "Stop Making Sense" and "The Agronomist," about Haitian human rights activist Jean Dominique. Demme will be recognized next month for the "spirit" he brings to such films, festival President Patricia Finneran said.

The Talking Heads movie showed his fun side, while other documentaries reveal that "he cares about poor people and how they live their lives, and telling their stories," Finneran said.

The June 12-17 festival will show the theatrical premiere of Demme's "New Home Movies from the Lower 9th Ward," about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Silverdocs festival in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland, has in five years has become one of the leading U.S. documentary showcases. This year it will offer 100 films from around the world, many grouped into themes such as faith, the environment and politics.

From China, for example, "Please Vote for Me," looks at the cutthroat politics of a third-grade election for class monitor in a provincial school, where an entire class is reduced to tears by campaign dirty tricks.

A world premiere of "14 Women" focuses on the growing number of women in the U.S. Senate.

Other world premieres at the festival are "Stand Up: American Muslim Comics Come of Age," "Waking Aphrodite" -- a daughter's movie about her radical sex-therapist mother, and "Orthodox Stance," about a Hasidic boxer in New York.

Additional films include Doug Prey's "Big Rig," about U.S. long-haul truck drivers and "Arctic Tale," which follows a walrus and a polar bear from birth to parenthood. The documentary is made by the producers of "March of the Penguins" and the studio that made "An Inconvenient Truth" about global warming.

Festival audiences will also get a chance to see an appearance by Reverend Billy, the comic preacher of the activist performance group The Church of Stop Shopping. He will be on hand for the showing of "What Would Jesus Buy?" in which he features.

The festival is sponsored by the American Film Institute and Discovery Channel. It will also offer industry conferences on "filmanthropy" -- linking documentary filmmakers with nonprofit and advocacy groups -- and on new ways of distributing films in the digital era.

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