‘Naitou,’ ‘Ori’ Continue Pan African Fest

Screening today at 3:20 p.m. and again on Thursday at 1:10 p.m. in the Pan African Film Festival at the Sunset 5 is Moussa Komoko Diakite’s exquisite “Naitou” (“The Orphan”), said to be the first feature film from the Republic of Guinea. The film presents the Ballet Africain in an enchanting fairy tale, set to irresistibly tinkling music, involving the Cinderella-like fate of a young woman ill-treated by her father’s other wife. Exuberant dancing, fanciful costumes and an overall charm more than make up for wild fluctuations in the quality of the film’s color and lighting.

Also screening today (at 9:15 p.m.) is Raquel Gerber’s “Ori,” a free-flowing account of the transmigration of African civilization to Brazil, centering on the formation in the 17th Century of the Quilombo de Palmares, an African-style warrior establishment/initiation society dedicated to resisting oppression and uniting blacks and native South Americans. Dedicated to the understanding and preservation of Brazil’s African heritage as a source of black pride and unity, the film features the observations of black historian Beatriz Nascimento--and lots of seductive Afro-Brazilian music.

Information: (213) 295-1706.

Distribution company Direct Cinema Limited presents in association with the International Documentary Assn. the first International Documentary Film Festival at the Sunset 5, beginning Friday and running through Oct. 29. The opening-day attractions, all of which will be repeated, are especially strong:

Mickey Lemle’s “Compassion in Exile: The Story of the 14th Dalai Lama” (screening at 2:45 p.m.) offers a portrait of His Holiness of unprecedented intimacy. This gentle and wise man with an engagingly silly laugh and a fine command of English speaks eloquently--and with a saintly air of forgiveness--of the genocide his people have endured for three decades at the hands of the Chinese while the world has done little or nothing in behalf of Tibet for fear of offending China.

There’s also footage smuggled out of Tibet documenting the terrible brutality of the Chinese military.

Documentaries don’t get much better than William Miles’ smart, lively, emotion-charged “Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II” (4:30 p.m.), which calls attention to the little-known African-American World War II battalions and their prominent role in liberating the concentration camps.

Miles, who makes succinct use of archival materials, brings together a group of hearty vets, who speak of the cruel ironies of fighting a war for democracy while serving in a rigidly segregated Army, and a group of Holocaust survivors, whom they freed.

Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson’s “Black Harvest” (6:45 p.m.) is a vital, heartbreaking account of an ill-fated alliance between Joe Leahy, a wealthy Papua New Guinea coffee planter born of a native mother and a white Australian father, who goes into partnership with a native tribe just as coffee prices fall, destroying the natives’ dream. The handsome, hard-driving Leahy is a man caught between two cultures, just as the natives, who still resolve disputes with other tribes with bow and arrow, are caught between past and present.

No story of the Old West is quite so compelling as that of “The Donner Party” (9 p.m.), which Ric Burns brings alive with archival materials and with shots of the actual route the party took, an untested, all-but-impassible supposed shortcut to California through the High Sierra that so delayed the 87-member party that they were stranded for five winter months of record-setting harshness, driven notoriously in many instances to cannibalism.

Sometimes Burns is so low-key, an understandable impulse on his part, as to let attention wander, but the true-life tale has everything: heroism, cowardice, stupefying folly and pride and a truly terrible irony. For all the bad luck, poor judgment and just plain ignorance that characterized the Donner Party’s trek, it missed being able to cross over to the Western side of the soon-to-be blizzard-ridden High Sierra by just one day.

Information: (213) 848-3500.