‘Holy Office’ Among Best of Cinema Judaica Film Fest

Among the strongest films at Cinema Judaica ‘95, continuing this week at the Monica 4-Plex, is Arturo Ripstein’s 1975 “The Holy Office” (“El Santo Officio”), which screens Tuesday at 7 p.m.

It reveals how the long arm of the Spanish Inquisition extended to the New World, where Jews in Mexico were in every bit as much peril at the end of the 16th century as those in Spain. This is a compelling tragedy of a well-to-do family slowly but relentlessly destroyed when its youngest son, sent off to a monastery at age 10, returns home as a young man for his father’s funeral and feels compelled to confess that he witnessed some unfamiliar rituals that his friar recognizes as outlawed Jewish practices.

As it turns out, his family is in fact part of a small Jewish community forced to pass themselves off as Catholics but who are determined to practice their ancestral faith behind closed doors and at extreme peril.

This is one of those harrowing films that sounds unbearable to watch but possesses such majesty, such moral authority, that you cannot turn your eyes away. It is, however, ironic to contrast this film with “I Kiss This Land” (Saturday at 1 p.m.), a celebration of Mexico as a haven for Jewish immigrants of the 1920s.

Also screening Tuesday (at 1, 3, 5 and 10 p.m.) is Harriet Wichin’s thoughtful “Silent Witness.” It is a contemplation of the concentration camps and their significance, Auschwitz in particular, where we meet Tadeusz Zymanski, the last of 18 Auschwitz survivors who returned to the camp shortly after liberation to dedicate their lives to its preservation.

Juri Chaschwatski’s ironically titled documentary “Everything Is Fine” (Thursday at 2:15 and 7 p.m.) records the heartbreaking exodus of Jews from an increasingly anti-Semitic post-Soviet Ukraine, interspersed with numbers performed by a lively, politically caustic Yiddish musical comedy group. Along with younger family members bidding farewell to those who feel too old to leave, there are glimpses of quaint ancient ghettos, emptying and already crumbling.

Alexander Proshkin’s “To See Paris and Die” (Thursday at 4:30 and 9:15 p.m.), set in 1963 Moscow, stars Nina Usatova as an elegant blond whose son (Vladimir Steklov), a concert pianist of great promise, must have a wife to ensure his return if he is to participate in an international competition to be held in Paris. Swift and stylish, “To See Paris and Die” is dominated by Usatova’s galvanic star portrayal, and it evolves into a classic women’s picture that uses melodrama to reveal the terrible toll bigotry and a resulting denial of identity exacts.

The festival also brings some key revivals. Jiri Weiss’ beautiful, heart-rending “Martha and I” (Wednesday at 2 and 7 p.m.), a love story told with uncommon poignancy and meaning, stars Marianne Sagebrecht and Michel Piccoli as an unlikely couple whose mutual devotion develops limitless depths. Great love blossoms between them, but Martha, a Catholic peasant, and Ernst, an urbane, agnostic Jew, are the right couple in the wrong place, a charming town on the German-Czech border in the late ‘30s.

If you missed “Mina Tannenbaum,” shown Sunday evening and in an all-too-brief run at the Nuart earlier this year, it screens again Friday at 9:15 p.m. French filmmaker Martine Dugowson has made a major film on the meaning of friendship.

Dugowson, a cinematographer in her smashing feature-directing debut, leaves us with a heightened awareness that the most important of friendships can be fragile and possess limits and that friendship, like life itself, is invariably provisional. This is a real depth-charge of a movie, one that you can’t--and shouldn’t--easily shake off. Romane Bohringer and Elsa Zylberstein star.

Also noteworthy is Gregg Bordowitz’s “Fast Trip, Long Drop” (Friday at 1, 3, 5 and 7 p.m.), a video diary dealing with Bordowitz’s coming to terms with his HIV-positive status. “Fast Trip, Long Drop” also screens at the Sunset 5 Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. as does a reprise of the festival opener, “Young at Hearts.”

For full schedule: (310) 394-9741.