Actress Brings Vision of Holocaust Mother to Film Fest

The sixth annual Israeli Film Festival, at the Cineplex Odeon Fairfax Theater, opens Saturday with a gem. “Summer of Aviya” (8:30 p.m.) is based on an autobiographical novel by one of Israel’s leading actresses, Gila Almagor, who also produced the film and plays the spectacular leading role: a single mother deeply scarred by her Holocaust experiences, a complex character based on Almagor’s own mother.

“Aviya,” Silver Bear winner at the 1989 Berlin Film Festival, is unflinchingly honest. Almagor and actor-director Eli Cohen extract humor and empathy from these painful recollections in ways both engaging and inspiring.

Almagor will also participate in a seminar at 5 p.m. Sunday, along with Israeli actress-director-writer Michal Bat-Adam, co-star of “Madame Rosa” and writer-director of this year’s provocative festival entry, “A Thousand and One Wives” (7:30 p.m. Sunday). “Burning Memory,” Yosi Somer’s compassionate portrayal of shell-shocked and wounded Israeli soldiers, will screen at 9:30 p.m. Sunday.

The rest of the festival’s weekend schedule includes Uri Zohar and Boaz Davidzon’s parody of early Israeli TV, “Lul” (10:30 p.m. Saturday); Noam Yvor’s drama on Israeli writer Amnon Yehoshua, starring John Savage (1 p.m. Sunday), and Haim Bouzaglo’s social satire “Fictitious Marriage” (5 p.m. Sunday). Ticket information: (213) 653-3117.

The UCLA Film Archives’ on-going Asian Pacific American Film Festival offers two offbeat items this week. Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s “Surname Viet Given Name Man” (Sunday, 7:30 p.m.) is a highly formal documentary on Vietnamese women. Shot by Minh-Ha in austere, subtly balanced frames, the women--speaking, often uncomfortably, in English--relate their unhappy experiences in the old and new Vietnamese societies and their general mistreatment by everyone, including callous American soldiers. The movie is sometimes like a silk flower on Formica: so bizarrely empty-looking and serene, it lulls you.

A rawer film in every way, Gregg Araki’s “The Long Weekend O’ Despair” (Tuesday, 8 p.m.) is a low-budget evocation of post-punk malaise among a group of six omnisexual and fearfully bored young Angelenos: three ex-college friends and their notably faithless lovers.

This sextet divides neatly into gay, lesbian and (sort of) straight couples, who spend the weekend cruising Melrose Avenue, wandering the night streets, holing up in their film maker/host’s apartment, having endless lover’s quarrels and expressing disgust and disaffection with almost everything.

The movie, shot on a budget of less than $5,000, doesn’t totally avoid being the pretentious downer that description suggests. These kids are whiners and one tends to tire of them. But there are saving graces. Though this may be a somewhat petulant vision, it’s an honest one; not one punch is being pulled. The references are sharply contemporary and the lines sometimes have a biting, self-flagellating wit; director-writer-cameraman-editor Araki has a fine sense of how to use monochrome, how to create visual intensity and variety with minimal means. And Araki’s tenacity in making films--like this one and “Three Bewildered People in the Night,” a triple prize winner at the Locarno Film Festival--has its heroic side. Let’s hope he can someday edge his budgets up to, say, the “Stranger Than Paradise” level.

Another current UCLA Film Archives series is somewhat all-embracingly called “International Film Stylists.” The first week’s stylists include challenging and occasionally radical film makers such as Italy’s Pier Paolo Pasolini, with his 1974 “Arabian Nights”; West Germany’s uncompromising minimalists Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet with their 1983 Kafka adaptation, “Class Relations” (both at 8 p.m. Wednesday); and the Hungarian long-take virtuoso, Miklos Jancso, with his 1978 “Hungarian Rhapsody” (7:30 p.m. Friday).

The other half of Friday’s double feature is one of the great lyric achievements of 1960s cinema: Sergei Paradjanov’s 1964 “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.” Paradjanov had not yet settled into his recent “tableau” style. And “Shadows,” his debut film, was a poetic explosion, with the camera reeling almost drunkenly around the Carpathian landscapes to a haunting folk score, showing us doomed lovers, erotic chases in the forest, bloody feuds, wildly colorful festivals, funerals in the snow, and--his most startling image--the death vision of the wild horses of fire. It’s an unforgettable film from an unquenchable film maker.