MOVIE REVIEW : Los Angeles Festival,”Home, Place and Memory”, A citywide Arts Fest : A Trio of Witty, Warm Dramas : The centerpiece is ‘Finding Christa,’ a group portrait of wise and strong black women.

The three warm, witty and engrossing films of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch--”Finding Christa,” “Older Women and Love” and “Suzanne, Suzanne”--take us into the vital world of Billops’ family, whose members give of themselves generously to the camera and with scarcely a trace of reservation or inhibition. As a result, their films seem not so much documentaries as records of real-life dramas unfolding before our eyes.

The centerpiece is the 60-minute “Finding Christa” (1991), a unique, emotion-charged account of Billops’ reunion with her daughter Christa, whom she gave up for adoption at age 4, 21 years earlier. In essence, this film is a group portrait of a family of remarkably wise and strong black women.

Billops is an extraordinarily lucky woman on several counts--first of all, because Christa was adopted by Margaret Liebig, a loving woman who sings professionally as Rusty Carlyle. It was Liebig who, trusting Christa’s love for her, urged Christa to seek out her birth mother, believing that no matter what, she would feel better for having done so. Secondly, because Christa has turned out to be a breathtakingly beautiful and talented singer-composer, as striking-looking and creative a woman as Billops herself. Billops makes no apologies for having given up her daughter, whom she felt she could not properly support as a single mother. Christa, in turn, finds herself able to forgive Billops for giving her up and to commence a relationship with her.

Among the large number of cousins Christa meets for the first time is the subject of the 30-minute “Suzanne, Suzanne” (1982), another on-camera depiction of a reconciliation between mother and daughter. Suzanne’s story is that of a young woman who always felt plain alongside her enduringly beautiful and elegant mother and who was systematically beaten by her drunken late father, who was also a wife-beater. When we meet Suzanne, she has overcome heroin addiction and is now prepared to forgive her mother for not having been able to protect her.

“Older Women and Love” (1987), the most documentary-like of the three films, presents us with a varied group of women, all of whom explain why and how they’re able to attract younger men. These three films leave us wanting to see more from Billops and Hatch.

* “Suzanne, Suzanne” and “Finding Christa” screen today at 2 p.m. at the Vision Complex in Leimert Park.