Film in the Female Gender : Festival: Women in Film mounts its annual program of screenings and seminars at the Directors Guild.

A trio of French films, including the latest in director Diane Kurys’ autobiographical series that began with “Peppermint Soda,” highlight the sixth annual Women in Film Festival, which gets under way tonight with a premiere of Kurys’ “C’est la Vie” at the Directors Guild of America in West Hollywood.

The festival, which runs through Sunday, will also feature the American premieres of Bertrand Tavernier’s “Daddy Nostalgia,” a relationship drama written by Tavernier’s ex-wife, Colo Tavernier O’Hagan, and first-time director Charlotte Brandstrom’s “Stormy Summer.”

Sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of Women in Film, the festival offers 53 programs in film and television that are written, produced or directed by women. Included are 16 feature films--nine in official competition--and 13 documentaries.

Also on view will be short films, music videos and animated shorts. Television will be represented by children’s programs, TV movies, miniseries, specials, episodic comedies and dramas, documentaries and news shows. Last year’s festival drew an audience of 10,000.

Tributes will be held for veteran casting director Ruth Burch, “Sesame Street” creator Joan Ganz Cooney, and comedian-actress Whoopi Goldberg, whose new film, “The Long Walk Home,” will be shown. Special programs have been organized, including one that examines the lesbian experience in film. Master classes will be offered for professionals in producing and directing, and there will be seminars in independent producing, writing, selling docudramas, creating family shows and filmmaking in general.

Among pre-screened films, Kurys’ “C’est la Vie” stands out. The film, which concludes her poignant series that began with “Peppermint Soda” (1977) and continued with “Entre Nous” (1983), is a bittersweet recollection of a summer of adolescence. Set in 1958, it is the story of two sisters (Julie Bataille, Candice LeFranc) whose family vacation on the Brittany coast is disrupted by the decision of their mother (Nathalie Baye) to leave their father (Richard Berry).

The intimacy of this film is echoed in “Daddy Nostalgia,” which is based on events in writer Colo Tavernier O’Hagan’s life. The film marks the return to the big screen, after an 8-year absence, of Dirk Bogarde, who is superb as a British businessman confronted with his own mortality in the wake of heart surgery.

Married to a Frenchwoman (Odette Laure) and living in retirement in the South of France, he is visited by his screenwriter daughter (Jane Birkin), who is intent on getting to know the father who had little time for her while she was growing up. Bogarde is as gallant as Birkin is patient and tender, and this elegiac film is suffused with a father and daughter’s belated discovery and appreciation of each other.

“Stormy Summer” is a remarkably assured first film from L.A.-based Charlotte Brandstrom. Adapted by Brandstrom and Nicolas Bernheim from a novel by Pierre-Jean Remy, it is the story of a painful first love set during the occupation of France. The gradual interaction between its love triangle and the larger, increasingly dangerous circumstances of war is exceptionally complex, disturbing and illuminating.

Stanislas Carre de Malberg stars as a teen-ager who falls hard for his beautiful, teasing cousin (Judith Godreche), who in turn is dazzled by a British airman (Murray Head) taking refuge in her family’s provincial estate.

Other festival features especially recommended:

“One Thousand Pieces of Gold” (directed by Nancy Kelly and adapted by Anne Makepeace from Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s novel), is the story of a young Chinese woman (Rosalind Chao) sold by her desperate peasant father during a terrible drought. She ends up the “property” of a fellow countryman in a rough-and-tumble Oregon gold-mining village, circa 1880. The film is short on style and pace but strong in conviction and performances.

“The Long Walk Home” is a first-rate social-conscience drama, directed in straightforward TV-movie style by Richard Pearce, written by John Cork and acted with admirable understatement by Whoopi Goldberg and Sissy Spacek. Spacek is a well-off Montgomery, Ala., housewife and mother whose consciousness is gradually raised during the long and tense bus boycott by blacks, sparked by Rosa Parks’ epic refusal.

Goldberg plays Spacek’s housekeeper, a figure of dignity and self-control who must walk a great distance to and from work. She says little but her sheer presence and carefully chosen words at last have their impact upon her employer. Both stars are at their very best in “The Long Walk Home,” based on a true story and notable for its revelation of how social and economic pressures threaten to stifle an individual’s best instincts.

For general information: (213) 463-0931; for schedule and tickets, call Theatix: (213) 466-1767.