‘Home’ Shorts Kick Off Fall Season at Filmforum

Filmforum, the alternative cinema showcase, begins its fall programming tonight at 7:30 at the Hollywood Moguls, 1650 Schrader St. (formerly Hudson), with the 80-minute “Home Is Where the Heart Is (Not),” composed of six intense and surreal short films expressing the trauma of childhood. Most impressive is Jay Rosenblatt’s “The Smell of Burning Ants,” in which he reprocesses found footage in a way to reveal how boys are conditioned to be aggressive, even sadistic.

Jon Moritsugu’s 68-minute “Mod F--- Explosion” (at 9:30, separate admission), a real discovery, is a dynamic punk odyssey of a pair of innocent teens adrift in a violent urban world; Moritsugu unleashes a barrage of powerful images and hard-driving music.

Marriage and Survival: On Nov. 7, 1942, in the ghetto of Riga, Latvia, Helma and Benno Schneider pledged their love for each other in the presence of Helma’s parents and thereafter considered themselves married. Fifty years later in Los Angeles, their son, TV producer Sascha Schneider, organized a traditional Jewish wedding for his parents, and he and his wife, Laurie Zemelman-Schneider, documented not only the ceremony, which climaxes the profoundly emotional “Chuppa: The Wedding Canopy” (at the Sunset 5 for one week) but also persuaded his parents to talk about their miraculous Holocaust survival.

Beyond that, the younger Schneiders discuss their need to preserve their Jewish heritage while establishing more firmly their own identity and relationship; for them the ceremony becomes, beyond a healing and closure for Helma and Benno, a symbol of their own independence for Sascha and Laurie. This remarkable dimension of the 80-minute film is handled with both the utmost honesty and sensitivity.

All in the Family: The consistently outrageous and imaginative 1989 “Dr. Caligari” returns this week Fridays and Saturdays at midnight at the Sunset 5. It would have us believe that the evil director of the insane in the classic “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” has a granddaughter who wants to take up where he left more than 75 years ago.

The current Dr. Caligari (Madeleine Reynal) presides over her asylum (by a toxic waste dump) like a mad dominatrix, and her victim-patients are all caught up in extravagant, crazed indulgences in sex and drugs. Director-designer Stephen Sayadian and his co-writer Jerry Stahl, who made that other midnight-circuit hit “Cafe Flesh,” have created a darkly hilarious satire of contemporary aberrations and the gobbledygook we use to describe them.

Information: (213) 848-3500.