Abuse, WWII Subjects at ‘Rights’ Fest

Among the new films in the continuing “Human Rights Watch Festival” screening this week at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater are Isabelle Benkermoun and Francis Allegret’s “Off Limits” (screening Thursday at 9:30 p.m.) and Harriet Eder and Thomas Kufus’ “Mein Krieg” (Friday at 9:30 p.m.).

The first is a remarkable achievement in that the filmmakers persuade three victims of torture to speak about the unspeakable. They are an executive from Guinea, a shopkeeper from Algeria and a nurse from Chile; apparently, they are all now residing in France. For no apparent reason the Guinean, during the regime of the despot Sekou Toure, was apprehended, tortured and so starved that he lost his sight. The Algerian was a 13-year-old boy in March, 1958, when he was arrested by the French while carrying in his satchel some patriotic Arab songs.

Both the Guinean and the Algerian were tortured with electrical wiring hooked up to crank-operated field telephones; the Algerian also had toenails and teeth pulled out by pliers. The Chilean nurse can only reveal part of her experiences; her torture, which may have included gang rape, is too painful for her to discuss in detail. All three eventually were forced to sign false statements to save their lives. Benkermoun and Allegret provide an atmosphere of dignity and simplicity in which their interviewees tell of their terrible ordeals. Indeed, “Off Limits,” which gives us no expository information because it really is not needed, is compelling, both in its austere visuals and in the words of its subjects.

“Mein Krieg” (“My War”) could use some tightening, but attention wanders only when its archival footage is allowed to become overly repetitive. Somehow, the filmmakers were able to locate six German World War II soldiers, all of them veterans of the doomed invasion of Russia and all of them skilled amateur cameramen who preserved their footage all these years. As we watch the old footage depicting Germany’s armed forces preparing for the brutal Russian campaign only to be forced into eventual retreat, the filmmakers let the six men, all of them in late middle age or older, recall their wartime experiences.

In the process, the men all emerge as decent types, the kind of men we met in “Das Boot,” who remind us of our own World War II veterans. The filmmakers let them tell their stories rather than interrogate them; even so, none emerges as a Nazi fanatic, although one man, who says he saw himself as “an instrument of the state,” proudly announces that his conscience is “as clear as crystal” and amuses himself by re-creating the Brandenburg Gate in miniature, complete with figures of soldiers on horseback passing through it.

The most reflective of the six is the only one to speak of the Holocaust, of his and all German soldiers’ roles as “accomplices”; he also filmed the hanged corpses of about a dozen Jews. Another man requests that he not be asked whether he shot Russian civilians. “Mein Krieg” is invaluable as a record of life on the front, both in battle and in leisure, and as a portrait of a seemingly ordinary group of men caught up in a doomed and devastating military campaign.

The festival also includes reprises of such landmark films as Christian Blackwood’s “Signed, Lino Brocka” (tonight at 7:30), Marcel Ophuls’ epic-scale, sardonic 1988 “Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie” (Wednesday at 7 p.m.) and his “A Sense of Loss” (Thursday at 7 p.m.), a monumental study of strife-ridden Northern Ireland.

The first is an engaging documentary on the courageous, controversial and dynamic filmmaker who was the Philippines’ leading director up to his recent and untimely death in a car accident. It is a good introduction first to the man and his work and then his eventual commitment to the downfall of the Marcos regime. A homosexual whose mother prostituted herself so she could afford to send him to college and a one-time Mormon missionary who worked with the lepers of Molokai, Brocka had a lifelong passion for the cinema, and his best-known film is 1989’s “Macho Dancer,” a compassionate, tender love story set in Manila’s harsh gay underworld of male go-go dancers and hustlers.

Information: (310) 206-FILM, 206-8013.