LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : Yes, There Are Even Movies : Coming to you from all over the globe to all over the city--the festival’s cinema offerings range from the sublime to the . . . well, you be the judges

A preview sampling of the films that will be shown at the L.A. Festival reveals a range typical of all festivals: from the insufferably pretentious to the truly sublime. The question is, will one extreme predominate?

There are more than 100 offerings, some old mixed in with the new, divided into six series and presented in varied venues across the city. (See the accompanying festival calendar, starting on Page 7, for dates, times and locations.)

“Of Many Cultures: Asian and African Jews in World Cinema,” curated and presented by Ella Shohat, professor of cultural studies at City College of New York, will focus on the complex identity of Asian and African Jews across the world. Among the new films in this series is Alan Berliner’s highly acclaimed “Intimate Stranger,” an experimental American film involving a search for the filmmaker’s father, an immigrant from Egypt.

Ateyyat El Abnoudi will present a retrospective of her films in a highlight of “Voices of Liberation: Women’s Film and Video in Africa, the Middle East and the Diaspora.” Another offering in the series is Nina Menkes’ 1983 “The Great Sadness of Zohara,” a quietly compelling reverie on a young woman (Tinka Menkes) whose increasing sense of alienation from her Orthodox Jewish life drives her to journey deeper and deeper into Arab lands.

New films in this series that are said to be promising are Rakhshan Banietemad’s “Nargess,” an Iranian film about two very different women and their oppression by overwhelming cultural conditions, and Leslie Thornton’s “The Great Invisible,” which tells of Victorian writer and poet Isabelle Eberhardt, who fled from Geneva to Algeria, where she lived an adventurous life until her untimely death at 27.

The third series, “Exile,” curated by Hamid Naficy, professor of media studies at Rice University, consists of six films that address aesthetics, politics and themes experienced by people in exile and in the Diaspora. Highlights include Tevfik Baser’s “40 Meters Squared--Germany” about a Turkish couple living in extreme isolation and alienation in Germany, and Yilmaz Arslan’s “Passages,” a debut film about a group of disabled teen-agers coping with coming of age in a rehabilitation center.

“African-American Film and Video,” curated by UCLA English professor Valerie Smith, is an ambitious five-program offering assembled to illuminate the ways in which black filmmakers express the multiplicity of the black experience and also the manner in which they respond to how African-American lives have been represented in the media.

Among the films to be screened are Koina Freeman’s “Little Black Panther,” which reveals what it’s like to grow up as the child of a Black Panther Party founder; Marlon Riggs’ controversial, award-winning “Tongues Untied,” a stunning and original celebration of love between black men that utilizes dance, poetry, tableaux and impassioned stream-of-consciousness narration; Zeinabu Davis’ stylized “A Powerful Thang,” a call for black women to get in touch with themselves, their bodies and their ancestral culture--Davis leavens her feminist seriousness with gentle humor in regard to romance--and Marco Williams’ feature-length “In Search of Our Fathers,” a fascinating record of his seven-year quest for the father he had never known, taking us through an African-American family with four generations of unwed mothers.

Among the five films in “Islamic Cinema” is a revival of Mehdi Charef’s gritty yet beautiful 1986 “Tea in the Harem of Archimedes,” a superbly evoked classic coming-of-age tale in which Charef takes the broadest, most detached perspective in telling of a pair of drifters, a French youth and his best friend, an Algerian immigrant, who live in a vast, stark housing project on the outskirts of Paris and get by as petty thieves. Another promising entry, Tariq Ali’s “The Final Solution,” documents the history of Islam in Spain and its oblitera tion during the Spanish Inquisition.

“Armenian Cinema” has several tempting offerings, starting with Arby Ovanessian’s 1971 “The Spring,” in which two lovers dare to cross the division between Christian and Muslim. Others are Pea Holmquist’s “Back to Ararat,” a beautiful, surreal, exceedingly complex documentary on Armenian survivors of the Turkish massacre, and “Calendar,” the latest film of noted Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, which involves an Armenian-Canadian photographer on a crucial assignment in Armenia.

Only a small portion of the films in any of the series, several of which overlap, have been available for previews, but the following sampling may suggest the parameters of the L.A. Festival offerings.

The benchmark for pretentious obfuscation may well be set by L.A. Festival Artistic Director Peter Sellars himself with his “Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez.” In deciding to make a silent film dealing with the collapse of the economy and the plight of the homeless, he had a terrific opportunity to reveal that the medium was not necessarily dead merely because it had been rendered commercially obsolete by the advent of sound more than 65 years ago.

Eschewing intertitles and embracing a non-linear narrative, Sellars plunges us swiftly into confusion and then indifference with his Wall Street fable for the ‘90s. (Ironically, clarity was a hallmark of silent era filmmakers.) John Adams’ glorious score, David Walker’s gleaming camerawork and the considerable presence of Peter Gallagher, Joan Cusack, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ron Vawter (the last two playing homeless men) do not save the film from being unwatchable.

By way of happy contrast, the festival is also presenting two landmark African-American films: Charles Burnett’s 1978 “Killer of Sheep,” a beautiful and anguished documentary-like account of several days in the life of an L.A. slaughterhouse worker (played with powerful understatement by Henry Gayle-Sanders) struggling to support his family, and Riggs’ “Tongues Untied.”

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s “And Life Goes On” is a tedious account of a father and son traveling through earthquake-ravaged portions of Iran, but his “Where Is the Friend’s Home?” is pure enchantment. It’s a wry, suspenseful, beautifully wrought tale about the indifference of adults to children as a stalwart 8-year-old, living in an ancient mountain village, embarks on a long trek by foot to return a notebook to a classmate who will be expelled if he doesn’t have it with him at the beginning of school the following day.

Amos Gitai’s stunning “Berlin Jerusalem” could be the most sophisticated Israeli film ever made: Two very different women, a tempestuous German Jewish poet (Lisa Kreuzer) and a steadfast Russian revolutionary (Rivka Neumann), find their destinies in the Holy Land. It was shot by the legendary Henri Alekan, the veteran cinematographer celebrated for his contributions to Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire.”

Speaking of the Israeli cinema, there will be revivals of two Oscar-nominated Moshe Mizrahi films from the ‘70s, “The House on Chelouche Street,” a fresh and appealing coming-of-age story set against Israel’s impending war for independence from British rule, and “I Love You, Rosa,” a tender, poignant account, set largely before the turn of the century, about a 20-year-old widow (Michal Bat-Adam) who, according to custom, is betrothed to her 11-year-old brother-in-law (Gabi Otterman), of whom she is fond but will not be able to marry for seven years.

The Felliniesque “Alexandria . . . Why?,” the first part of major Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine’s sprawling, impassioned autobiographical “Egyptian Trilogy,” introduces his alter ego as an Alexandria prep school student in 1942 who pines to be both Gene Kelly and Laurence Olivier and whose goal is to study at the Pasadena Playhouse.

With the slow, stately pacing of a historical pageant, top veteran Mexican director Arturo Ripstein re-creates the Spanish Inquisition as it affected 16th-Century Mexico in “The Holy Office.” Applying Technicolor-bright imagery to what was a sordid and baroque historical moment, Ripstein focuses on handsome Jorge Luke as the eldest son of a persecuted Jewish family vacillating between understandable cowardice and intermittent religious fervor.

In Saeed Assadi’s reflective and unsettling “The Ebro Runs Dry,” a perfectly ordinary Swedish construction worker (Per Allan Lofberg) visits Spain to claim his inheritance from his father, a member of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, and is confronted with a rising tide of neo-fascism.

Co-presenting the film and video portions of the L.A. Festival are the Armenian Film Society, Filmforum, the Gay and Lesbian Media Coalition, the Independent Feature Project/West’s Project Involve, the International Documentary Assn., Women in Film International and Al-Funun Al-Arabiya, a local Arab arts organization. Lori Fontanes is the festival’s director of film and video, and Meena Nanji is its line producer.

Information: (213) 240-7600.