Cinema Judaica to Join Israel Fest Offerings

Overlapping the 12th Israel Film Festival, which concludes Dec. 14 at Laemmle’s Royal Theater, Cinema Judaica ‘95: The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival will run Sunday through Dec. 21 at Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, Santa Monica.

Together these two festivals present a unique opportunity to see many outstanding and diverse films. Cinema Judaica ’95 begins Sunday at noon with a screening of the postwar Hollywood classic on anti-Semitism in America, “Gentlemen’s Agreement” (1947), starring Gregory Peck and directed by Elia Kazan from Moss Hart’s adaptation of the Laura Z. Hobson bestseller. It will be followed at 2 p.m. with Don Campbell’s joyful “Young at Hearts,” which documents the lives of eight vibrant, elderly Jewish women who enjoy living.

The point here is that these eminently likable West L.A. ladies are all smart enough to be grateful for sufficient health and finances to be able to live comfortably and fully. Old age can be such a bum rap it’s gratifying that Campbell has been able to give an honest, upbeat spin. As the festival’s official opening attraction, “Young at Hearts” screens as a benefit for the Westside Jewish Community and My Jewish Recovery Place.

Daniel Goldberg’s “A Kiss to This Land” (Sunday at 4:45 p.m.; Dec. 16 at 1, 5 and 9:30 p.m.) is a beautiful and deeply moving study of seven Jews, most of them from Eastern Europe, who immigrated to Mexico in the 1920s with almost no money and few contacts but who built solid lives entirely from scratch and who’ve managed to preserve Judaism in this heavily Catholic nation. The title comes from the remark of a man who says that if he could have foretold the good fortune he has had in Mexico, he would have kissed the land upon his arrival in Veracruz 62 years earlier.

There will be Cinema Judaica ’95 screenings at two other Laemmle venues: the Town Center 5, Encino (Dec. 18-21), and the Sunset 5, West Hollywood (Dec. 16-17 at 11 a.m.).

A Surrealistic Game: Jun Kurosawa’s audacious, surreal 80-minute “Neko-Mimi” screens Thursday at 5, 7:15 and 9:30 p.m. at the Nuart as a benefit for Filmforum. It’s an eerie, beautiful fable set mainly in a vast loft where four young people--three women and a man--lead a ritualized existence of playing simple games so continuously that they lose all sense of time. An apparently innocent intruder is perceived as a terrible threat to the entrenched routines of the quartet’s existence.

Its indolent rhythm, distorted high-contrast imagery and riveting industrial-sounds score make this at once a film of dreamlike beauty and nightmarish terror. (Kurosawa is said not to be related to the famous Akira.)

Information: (310) 478-6379.

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Italian Series: The UCLA Film Archive’s third annual New Italian Cinema series, composed of eight films, opens Friday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater with Stefano Incerti’s spare, somber, sharply observed “The Man Who Checks Meters.”

It stars Antonio Iurio as a homely young Naples meter reader who develops an unrequited passion for an attractive young woman (Elodie Treccani). She unwittingly accepts a job with the unsavory proprietor of an electrical repair shop where the meter reader’s good-looking, outgoing brother (Roberto De Francesco) works; tragedy looms inevitably.

By way of refreshing contrast is Sandro Baldoni’s terrifically imaginative and entertaining satire of present-day and future ills, “Strange Stories” (Saturday at 9:30 p.m.), in which a father entertains his daughter during a train ride with three vignettes.

Versatile Ivano Marescotti is featured in all three. First, he’s a man desperate to pay his delinquent “air” bill as he faces a cutoff of oxygen. Then he’s a wistful type “purchased” at a supermarket by a woman yearning for passion. Lastly, he’s a blue-collar husband and father whose conflicts with new, upwardly mobile tenants across a courtyard escalates into all-out war as a fine old apartment undergoes gentrification; meanwhile, his TV, constantly on, reports on conflicts in Bosnia, a massacre in Sri Lanka and the L.A. riots.

Another sparkler: “Black Holes” (Sunday at 7 p.m.), Pappi Corsicato’s Almodovarish take on voyeurism.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.