MOVIE REVIEW : ISRAELI FILM FEST TO OPEN AT NUART

There are few better cultural bridges between countries than the movies. Beginning today, local film goers can cross one of those bridges.

The Israeli Film Festival, playing at the Nuart today through Thursday and Dec. 20-21, is the fourth annual event of its kind, but the first to reach Los Angeles. (It’s a New York perennial.) It includes nine films: eight of them local premieres, and all but one made since 1985. Watching them, whatever their quality, one gets a unique view into the popular or hidden faces of this sometimes anguished, always dramatic land.

The festival’s single revival, Uri Barabash’s 1984 Oscar nominee “Beyond the Walls,” is one of the few recent Israeli films that have gained U.S. release or reputation.

The nine-film series, in English or subtitled Hebrew and Arabic, is dominated by themes of contemporary Israeli life. There’s only one backward glance toward World War II and the Holocaust (Raphael Adar’s boxing film, “Gloves”). Among the subjects: women’s roles (in Naftali Alter’s “Irit, Irit”), marital problems (Michal Bat-Adam’s “The Lover”), emigration to the cities (Amos Guttman’s “Bar 51”) and the Army (Nadav Levitan’s “You’re in the Army, Girls”).

Two themes predominate: the problems of modern Israeli women and the explosive relationship between Jews and Arabs. The latter theme permeates the three films available for preview: “Avanti Popolo,” “Nadia” and “The Smile of the Lamb.”

All three present Arabs with great sympathy, in two cases, as central protagonists. All three also show perspectives critical, sometimes intensely so, of the treatment of Arabs by Israeli society and individuals. The films all take a basically humanitarian, liberal stance, but none demonstrate any racial bias. They are calls, simple and decent, for generosity and tolerance among people.

Amnon Rubenstein’s “Nadia” (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Dec. 21) shows us a young Arab girl, luminously played by Hana Azulai-Hasfari, torn in a number of cultural and sexual directions as she prepares for a medical education at a Jewish boarding school. It’s an unexceptional but pleasant little film, low-key, unforced.

Far better--both in cinematography and acting--is Shimon Dotan’s “The Smile of the Lamb” (tonight and Tuesday, Thursday and Dec. 21), which won Tuncel Kurtiz--as a defiant old Arab villager, caught in a clash between benevolent and hard-nosed Israeli administrators--the best actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

Raphui Bukaee’s “Avanti Popoli,” (Sunday, Monday, Thursday and next Saturday) has the best story of the three--and full-blooded comic acting. Set in the Sinai desert, it’s a black comic fable, stranding two solitary Egyptian soldiers, on a dangerous picaresque trek--interrupted by crazy journalists, drunken orgies, mine fields and suspicious Israeli antagonists--to the Suez Canal. Suheil Hada gives a rousing turn as a Jewish Egyptian soldier (and civilian-life actor); his Shylock-in-the-desert is a gem. “Avanti Popolo” pleads for understanding, while showing some of the pricklier realities, filtered through comedy or romance, of contemporary Israel. It’s an amusing and moving cultural “open sesame.”

The festival begins tonight at the Nuart, with a 7:15 p.m. champagne reception, and showings of “The Smile of the Lamb” and “Irit, Irit.” (For further information, call 213-473-6701.)