‘Zohar’ Highlights Israel Film Festival : With his new work and ‘Cup Final,’ director Eran Riklis emerges as the collection’s strongest voice.

The Israel Film Festival, which runs Saturday through Oct. 25 at the Sunset 5, is composed of eight new features, four new documentaries and 10 revivals. All will screen several times.

With one new film, “Zohar: Mediterranean Blues” (premiering Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), and one old one, “Cup Final” (first screening Sunday at 3:15 p.m.), director Eran Riklis emerges as the festival’s strongest voice.

To watch “Zohar” is at once to realize how adept Riklis has been at every turn in putting a fresh, vibrant spin on the familiar biography of the enormously popular singing star who climbs up from poverty only to succumb to epic-scale self-destructiveness.

The lean, intensely charismatic Shaul Mizrahi stars as Zohar Argov, whose struggle for recognition was made especially difficult because he was a Sephardic who sung passionate ethnic songs. However, Riklis suggests he was more seriously damaged even before his career started building steam when he was sent to prison for a year for assaulting a woman. “Zohar: Mediterranean Blues” is a first-rate example of unpretentious but dynamic, classic straight-ahead screen storytelling, and so is “Cup Final” (which screened in the recently concluded L.A. Festival). This is flat-out one of the finest Israeli films ever made--and one of world cinema’s most effective anti-war pictures.

Its wistful hero (Moshe Ivgi), his tickets in hand for the 1982 World Cup soccer finals in Barcelona, is called up to serve in Israeli’s invasion of Lebanon. He’s swiftly taken prisoner by eight PLO commandos who intend to take him to Beirut for either bounty or a prisoner exchange. The commandos’ leader (Muhammad Bacri), a sophisticated, humane individual, is able to perceive that both he and Ivgi are but pawns in a meaningless game over which they have no control. Besides, the two men share a passion for soccer, and the World Cup competition becomes a metaphor for the struggle that has ensnared the Israelis and the forces of the PLO.

One of the most subtle and low-key of the new films is Aner Preminger’s “Blind Man’s Bluff” (premiering Sunday at 9:45 p.m.). This is an engrossing, quietly powerful study of a beautiful young pianist (Hagit Dasberg), who as a key recital approaches, leaves her family home to take an apartment and commences asserting herself against her dominating, manipulative mother (Nicole Casel), who believes fervently that she wants only the best for her daughter but would suffocate her if she could. Preminger, who is distantly related to the late Hollywood director Otto Preminger, is an acute and graceful observer as the pianist discovers life opening up for her.

Another impressive offering, writer-director Hagai Levi’s “August Snow” (premiering Oct. 18 at 7:30 p.m.), takes us into Jerusalem’s warm and open-minded Italian-Jewish community--and then contrasts it with a group of austere and doctrinaire Ashkenazim.

Rami Hoyberger stars as Gabriel D’Angelo, a young man whose girlfriend Na’Ama (Avigail Arieli) disappears into the night. Virtually all the Ashkenazi elders order Gabriel to let her go and refuse to reveal her whereabouts, which becomes a source of suspense: Has she been kidnaped or has she gone into a spiritual retreat of her own volition?

Levi brings an eerie, mystical quality to “August Snow,” which has some boldly conceived dream sequences, and has deftly created a lovely, witty young woman, Allesandra (Gali Ben-Ner), to accompany Gabriel on his search for Na’Ama. Allesandra is clearly in love with Gabriel herself--and as time wears on, we hope she lands him.

Two you can miss: “Black Box,” an overheated brew of sex, politics and religion involving a woman torn between husbands past and present, and the heavily apocalyptic “Life According to Agfa,” which depicts a 12-hour cross-section of life in a Tel Aviv cafe.

Information: (213) 966-4166.