SCREENING ROOM : Asian Pacific Fest Continues With Solid Offerings

The UCLA Film Archive and Visual Communications’ ninth annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival continues with a rich array of offerings at various venues--what follows is but a sampling.

Riyad Wadia’s 75-minute “Fearless Nadia, the Hunterwali” (7 tonight at the Grande) is a charming portrait of his great-aunt, born Mary Evans in Australian in 1910, who in the ‘30s became the singing and dancing stunt-performing superwoman of the Hindi-speaking cinema.

For more than 80 years, the glittery Vegas-like Takarazuka Revue has attracted rabid female fans, and Kim Longinotti and Jano Williams’ delightful “Dream Girls” (9 tonight at the Grande) reveals why: The young women who play the male roles in the show possess a sensitivity and romanticism Japanese women find lacking in men in real life.

Oscar-winning Stirling Silliphant co-wrote Chatri Chalerm Yukol’s “Salween” (9 p.m. Tuesday at UCLA Melnitz), a powerful epic melodrama set in a corrupt, seedy border town on the Thailand side of the Salween River, which divides that country from Burma and which borders on the world’s biggest teak forests.

Through the skirmishing of a new wet-behind-the-ears police chief and a macho veteran sergeant, we view the tragic struggle of the minority Karen people against the oppressive Burmese majority, which has led to ruthless Thai arms merchants trading guns to both sides for teak, depleting the forests.

Documentarian Pratibha Parmar’s sensitive yet witty “Double the Trouble, Twice the Fun” (8 p.m. Tuesday at Hollywood Moguls, 650 N. Hudson) introduces us to a world of humorous disabled British lesbians and gays who are defying the cult of the body beautiful that enslaves many gays, especially men.

It’s amazing that an uncompromising film like Im Kwon-Taek’s “Sopyonje” (7 p.m. Thursday at the Grande) can become Korea’s biggest box-office hit ever. A stark tale, spanning 1945 to the early ‘70s--when pansori , plaintive traditional folk chants, were displaced by Western pop--it tells of a hard-drinking, hard-driving master of that form of music who wanders the countryside with his two foster children. As painful as it is profound, from Korea’s greatest filmmaker, “Sopyonje” reveals the virtually limitless sacrifices an art form can demand of its practitioners.

Takeshi Kitano’s stylish “Sonatine” (7 p.m. Thursday at Melnitz) is a droll, deadpan--and ultimately romantic--gangster movie, every bit as much an auteur work as a Jean-Pierre Melville underworld film. Kitano also stars, under his stage name “Beat” Takeshi, as a tough, burly Tokyo mobster dispatched by his boss to Okinawa along with several henchmen to help out an affiliated gang deal with rivals--only to discover that it’s a setup. Kitano has a driving, laconic visual style that never lags.

Park Kwang-Su’s “To the Starry Land” (Saturday, 2 p.m. at the Pacific Asia Museum, 46 N. Robles, Pasadena, and UCLA Melnitz at 9 p.m.) seems indubitably a masterpiece, a beautifully wrought tale of betrayal and reconciliation. A middle-aged businessman, accompanied by his lifelong friend, a poet, return to their native island to bury the businessman’s father only to be confronted with the islanders’ fierce opposition. Flashbacks catch us up in a harsh but healthy and largely happy existence destroyed by the Korean War--and reveal why the man’s burial is so vehemently opposed four decades after his departure.

Clara Law’s “Temptation of a Monk” (7 p.m. Sunday at Melnitz), the festival’s closing attraction, is an arty- as- all- get- out spiritual odyssey about a young Tang Dynasty general (Wu Hsin-Kuo) who betrays his crown prince for the good of the country only to find himself consumed with guilt, which leads to a long, bloody and lurid road to redemption.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.