Filmforum Closes ’94 With a Mixed Bag of Short Films

Filmforum, the alternative cinema showcase, concludes its programming for 1994 tonight at 8 at the Hollywood Moguls, 1650 Schrader St., with “First Sight Scene,” a collection of shorts by young filmmakers that ranges from the hopelessly tedious to the inspired and provocative.

The best are Alena Tam’s 12-minute “White Monkey,” a stunningly expressive account of a young Chinese American woman in the throes of a mental breakdown, and Michael Addis’ “The Car Thief,” a hilarious 14-minute vignette about a pompous movie executive (Steve Bean) whose car is stolen by a fiery Chicano (Richard James Montoya), who ends up pitching the executive’s proposed movie but with an amusingly politically correct slant.

Both of these films deal, in radically different ways, with discrimination and cultural gaps. Amy Gerber’s rambling but thoughtful 24-minute “Your Race Is Doomed” reveals the problems of identity and acceptance experienced by a young woman (Margit Edwards) born of a white father and a black mother and of others of similar mixed racial ancestry. Part narrative, part documentary and part travelogue, Gerber’s film could be much tighter and more coherent, but Edwards’ predicament is made painfully clear.

In an experimental mode, Erik Deutschman’s eight-minute “Left Alone With Night” offers a vibrant torrent of ever-changing colors and designs; and Carlos Palazio’s imaginative eight-minute “B.D.,” is a sensitive poetic homage in words and image to the ill-fated “Black Dahlia,” would-be starlet Elizabeth Short, whose brutal, unsolved 1947 murder yielded some of the most lurid headlines in L.A. newspaper history.

Information: (213) 466-4143.

German Comedy Series: The Goethe Institute, 5700 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 110, concludes its illuminating “German Comedy: East Meets West” series Tuesday at 7 p.m with Bertram von Boxberg’s spiky “Whoever Lies Twice,” a comedy as dark as it is droll.

Boxberg uses a classic structure of misunderstandings and misinformation to create a comedy in which reunification reveals the lingering paranoia between the East and the West. He then suggests that the tendency toward obedience and authoritarianism, as opposite sides of the same coin within the German character, endures, just as the impulse to cover up rather than confront the Nazi past continues beyond reunification.

Boxberg’s plotting cleverly maneuvers an elderly Frankfurt bookseller (Walter Buschoff, a veteran actor of warm, commanding presence) into posing as a retired judge, recruited to preside over a small court in Dresden because there is a dire shortage of judges in the West to administer former GDR courts.

The actual judge, living in Spain, was a tough, mediocre jurist. But, in posing as the judge, Buschoff intends to establish an enlightened, humane court. Complications inevitably surface, allowing Boxberg to take a critical stance toward reunification’s missed opportunities but also to show his amused understanding of human nature.

Information: (213) 525-3388.

A Dreary Gift: In the lurid “A Gift From Heaven” (at the Monica 4-Plex Wednesday for one week) a gutsy, gallant Sharon Farrell brings a fierce concentration and conviction to a middle-aged North Carolina backwoods woman for whom sex and religion are dangerously intertwined.

Seduced and left pregnant at age 12 by her evangelist uncle, she regards her son (David Steen, who also wrote the film), now well into his 30s, as “a gift from heaven” and loves him incestuously. Meanwhile, the daughter (Gigi Rice) who believes she has been adopted feels so unloved she has turned into the town tramp.

Into this family arrives a cousin (Sarah Trigger), an attractive young woman who unaccountably seems unaffected by the fact that her atheist parents have just burned themselves to death. At any rate, her presence, no matter how innocent she may be, may well be enough to teeter Farrell into all-out madness. Let it be said that, like Farrell, the rest of the cast are equally dedicated in their portrayals.

To give Steen, who adapted his own play, a generous benefit, maybe “A Gift From Heaven” worked on stage; it certainly does not on screen. Director Jack Lucarelli has no sense of pace, no visual acuity. As a result, “A Gift From Heaven” is a draggy, dreary experience whose determined solemnity, unrelieved by any sense of absurdity or even irony, only makes it all the more a turnoff.

Information: (310) 394-9741.