Israel Film Fest Begins With ‘Lovesick’

The 12th annual Israel Film Festival, postponed from Nov. 14 after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, opens Tuesday at 7:45 p.m. with Israel’s entry into the Oscar sweepstakes--the dark romantic comedy “Lovesick on Nana Street”--at the Royal Theater, where the festival will run two weeks. There will be a closing-night gala Dec. 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honoring Gila Almagor, the versatile and enduring grande dame of Israeli cinema.

Almagor is indisputably the star amid an ensemble cast in Shemi Zarhin’s bittersweet “Passover Fever” (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.), a kind of Israeli “Home for the Holidays” in which she plays the elegant, warm yet formidable matriarch who has gathered her large family together for the traditional Seder. She and her businessman husband (Yossef Shiloah) live in a large, tasteful but expensive home that could just as easily be located in Beverly Hills. The family is no more dysfunctional than most, but it is haunted by the loss of a son, killed in an army drill accident. In the course of the emotion-charged gathering there’s a great deal of confronting one’s self and others, but wisely Zarhin doesn’t leave us with the feeling that he’s tied up everything neatly with a ribbon.

Almagor has but two harrowing scenes in “Under the Domim Tree” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), the beautiful, bittersweet sequel to “The Summer of Aviya” (1988), which was a charming, funny and deeply poignant memoir. Both films are based on autobiographical novels by Almagor, who in effect played her own mother in them--a woman slowly being driven mad by the loss of her policeman husband to an Arab sniper, and by the Holocaust, although she had fled Poland before World War II broke out.

“Under the Domim Tree,” set in 1953, finds the now teen-aged Aviya (again the gravely beautiful enchantress Kaipo Cohen) living at a kibbutz-like boarding school housing teen-aged survivors of the Holocaust because her mother (Almagor) is now confined to a nearby mental institution. The school’s setting is idyllic, but moments of camaraderie are easily shattered by the teen-agers’ tormented memories; some of the young people are more damaged than others but in the end the healing process emerges from them learning to help each other. In almost all instances, eight years after World War II ended, none of them knows for sure whether their parents and most other relatives are dead or alive. This is a gentle, loving film about confronting pain and loss, beautifully directed, as before, by Eli Cohen.

Festival information: (213) 966-4166; tickets: (213) 466-1767.

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Among the films screening in Melnitz Theater Tuesday through Dec. 7 in the UCLA Film Archive’s “After the Fall: Romanian Film Since 1989” is Lucile Pintilie’s 1992 “The Oak” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), a darkly humorous post-Ceaucescu saga that is deliberately shocking, as a brutal, picaresque journey into chaos and as a portrait of a nation on the brink in which a teacher and doctor act like young criminal lovers on the run.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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To commemorate the centennial of the birth of Mae Marsh, who died in 1968, the Silent Movie is presenting the delightful “Polly of the Circus” (1917). Marsh’s screen immortality is secure for her heartbreaking portrayal of “Little Sister” in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and as the young wife desperate to save her innocent husband from the gallows in Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916).

As Polly, Marsh is beguiling as an injured circus bareback rider who recuperates at the parsonage of a small-town minister (Vernon Steele). Since it’s a long spell before the circus returns to town, Polly has plenty of time to recuperate, for the minister to fall in love with her and for the local deacon (Charles Riegel) to become scandalized. The authentic locales, the documentary-like circus sequences and the lovely, irrepressible Marsh make this deftly crafted production--Samuel Goldwyn’s first under his own banner--irresistible nostalgia.

Information: (213) 653-2389.