Youthful Drive and Outrage Liberate ‘Foreign Land’

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Contemporary Latin American Films” commences Tuesday at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ “Foreign Land,” a strong, bold film that sets the tone for this exceptional series.

It is set in 1990, when Fernando Collor de Mello, the first elected president of Brazil in nearly three decades, declares a confiscation of all savings accounts of the entire population, which had the effect of driving about 800,000 abroad. Among them is Alex (Fernanda Torres), a tempestuous woman of 28 working as a waitress in Lisbon, where she’s consumed with homesickness and despair. The filmmakers cut back and forth between Alex and Paco (Fernando Alves Pinto), a handsome 21-year-old in Sao Paulo who will eventually become involved with Alex in a high-risk diamond smuggling operation.

Shot in black-and-white, “Foreign Land” exudes youthful drive and outrage and is as romantic as it is critical.

First-time director Juan Carlos Valdivia’s venturesome “Jonah and the Pink Whale” (Thursday at 7:30 p.m.) is also set against a time of chaos: Bolivia caught in the spiraling inflation of the mid-’80s.

Based on Wolfgango Montes’ novel, it is an exhilarating, rueful fable in which Jonah (Dino Garcia), an erstwhile schoolteacher, is about to be swallowed up by his wife’s rich family, with whom he lives in a pink palace. Jonah’s father-in-law is a corrupt undertaker, a macho tyrant who embodies the evils of the Bolivian ruling class.

“Jonah and the Pink Whale” is an outrageous, gorgeous-looking satire that gets away with the most blatant symbolism--at the finish the pink palace is overtaken by the rising waters of a flood.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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On the Road: Marcelo Pineyro’s “Wild Horses” (April 9 at 7:30 p.m.) is a terrifically entertaining road movie that has its own distinctive flavor but is clearly inspired by American films.

A 70-year-old man (Hector Alterio, a tour de force) holds up a Buenos Aires bank, demanding $15,000 long owed him, but when a young executive (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a quintessential yuppie, reaches into a desk drawer, he comes up with no less than $500,000 that has no business being there. These two soon end up on the lam, becoming media folk heroes in the process.

Pineyro milks their predicament for all its worth, finding in it warmth, sentiment, humor and serious issues as well. With Cecilia Dopazo as the scruffy gamin who joins them and in brief but crucial appearances, those skilled veterans, Federico Luppi and Cipe Lincovsky.

Filmforum presents at the Nuart at noon this Saturday and Sunday only “Spirit Stream Storm,” a 105-minute program of experimental films from a number of major artists.

As important an event as it is, it frankly verges on being too much of a good thing: One dizzying abstract work tends to run into another. Not surprisingly, the several short works by Stan Brakhage stand out.

When you think of Brakhage you think of leafy, layered forest images, but most the these films, dating from 1981 to 1988, play with light against the richest, most intoxicating splashes of colors imaginable.

The program, which includes films by notables such as Charles and Ray Eames and Sergei Paradjanov, concludes with Bruce Posner and Amanda Katz’s “The Analects,” a 29-minute series of collages composed of a torrent of jumbled images presented with strobe-like rapidity. They are vibrant and personal but also wearying.

Information: (310) 478-6379.

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Comic “Rush”: The Silent Movie is presenting Wednesday at 8 p.m. Chaplin’s sublime “The Gold Rush” (1925) plus two of his major shorts, “The Immigrant” (1917) and “Shoulder Arms” (1918).

Buster Keaton’s equally superb “The General,” (1926) plus several Keaton shorts, will screen on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.

Information: (213) 653-2389.