Affecting ‘Nighthawks 2’ in Gay, Lesbian Film/Video Fest

One of the finest offerings in the ninth annual Los Angeles International Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival, currently at the Directors Guild, is Ron Peck’s “Nighthawks 2: Strip Jack Naked,” which screens tonight at 9:30.

Peck, the principal maker of the substantially autobiographical 1978 “Nighthawks,” regarded as Britain’s first true gay film and which was shown at the festival last Saturday, has created a film memoir of his own life and growing activism. He focuses on the long struggle in the making of the landmark “Nighthawks” and the fight against AIDS in the past decade. Peck’s revealingly detailed and deeply affecting account is at once a personal history and a chronicle of the fight for gay liberation and against AIDS in England.

Quite probably the finest film of the entire festival also comes from England. “The Garden” (Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4:30 p.m.) is experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman’s masterpiece, a dazzlingly surreal retelling of the story of Christ juxtaposed with the fate of a pair of young gay lovers, who are similarly crucified. Jarman’s images have never been more glorious, celebrating the beauty of nature and the joy of being alive, ever at odds with the forces of a darkly repressive society and church.

Also of a high order is German filmmaker Jochen Hick’s complex yet illuminating “Via Appia” (Thursday at 9:30 p.m., Saturday at 9:30 p.m.), in which a young German photographer (Peter Senner), who has AIDS, returns to Rio in search of a Brazilian youth he met in a sauna--called Via Appia--a pursuit that somehow is to give meaning to his life. The pretentiousness of the photographer’s venture (which he wants filmed as a kind of documentary) gives way to a larger odyssey through Rio and Sao Paulo’s sleazier byways, in which we become acutely aware that Brazil’s fabled handsome, readily available young men are living under the specter of AIDS.

More conventional but likely to have strong audience appeal is the heart-tugging Italian film “Forever Mary” (Wednesday at 9:30 p.m.). Michele Placido stars as a teacher who accepts a temporary post in a Sicilian reformatory only to discover his true calling in dedicating himself to the institution’s troubled youths. “Forever Mary” is not really a gay film, but it does take its title from a 16-year-old transvestite prostitute, a minor character but one who does have a key scene.

Appropriately, the festival will honor the late Lino Brocka, the Philippines’ top director, who was recently killed in a car accident. An outspoken foe of the Marcos regime--he once landed in prison--and later a critic of Corazon Aquino (who had enlisted his aid in framing a new constitution), Brocka was openly gay in a turbulent, predominantly Catholic nation.

Christian Blackwood’s splendid 1989 documentary “Signed, Lino Brocka” screens Saturday at 2 p.m. and will be followed at 4 by Brocka’s remarkable “Macho Dancer” (1988), a tender account of love between two youths struggling to survive in Manila’s gritty red-light district.

The Dutch lesbian comedy “Crocodiles in Amsterdam” (Tuesday at 9 p.m.) is arch and tedious in the extreme, involving an inept terrorist sidetracked by a flirtatious madcap. But Germany’s Monika Treut, the director of “Seduction: The Cruel Woman” and “The Virgin Machine,” has come through with another winner, “My Father Is Coming,” which is the festival’s closing attraction (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.). The film is slight and awkward around the edges, but is so good-natured as to be as irresistible as its star, the adorable Shelley Kastner. She plays a struggling actress-waitress in New York who is less than thrilled with the imminent arrival of her father from Germany. The whole business of her trying to keep secret her true sexual orientation from her father is rather silly, as a friend points out; it’s in fact little more than a device to get the story under way.

Festival schedule: (213) 650-5133.

Note: “The Films of Percy Adlon,” a retrospective of the German filmmaker best known for “Bagdad Cafe,” commences Wednesday at UCLA in Melnitz Theater at 7:30 p.m. with “Tomi Ungerer’s Country Life” (1973) and “The Guardian and His Poet” (1978). Information: (213) 206-FILM, (213) 206-8013.