Asian Pacific Fest to Close With Compelling Works

The 11th Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival continues at UCLA and LACMA with its usual fine array of challenging and exciting offerings. Among the films are four exceptionally strong and distinctive works.

Be prepared for an unusual degree of violence in Ishii Takashi’s “Gonin” (Friday at LACMA at 9:30 p.m.)--and that’s saying a lot, considering all the blood shed over the decades in the Japanese cinema. You may instantly think of Sam Peckinpah when you watch this stylish, gritty saga of five young Japanese men, all feeling the impact of the country’s economic setbacks, who join forces to bilk an underworld gang only to have their scheme backfire savagely. The effective “Gonin” is no more just a bloody exploitation picture than was “The Wild Bunch,” but it is so brutal it is hard to watch.

Garin Nugroho’s supple, trance-like “ . . . And the Moon Dances” (Saturday at LACMA at 2 p.m.) is set in the sunny compound of a veteran master (Ki Soetarman) of tinkly, traditional Javanese music. Among his pupils are a beautiful young woman (Paquita), a singer adoring of her teacher, and a deeply troubled young man (Norman Wibowo) who wants to be a composer. What ensues is a highly stylized and sensual psychological drama of exceptional intensity in which tragedy visits these two pupils in unexpected ways.

Wen Jan’s devastating, compelling “Super Citizen Ko” (Saturday at LACMA at 9:30 p.m.) is the latest of several films that examine the virulently anti-communist “White Terror” of Taiwan in the ‘50s. Such films became possible only with the lifting of Taiwan’s 38-year martial law in 1987.

It is at this moment that Ko (Lin Yang), having served 16 years in prison for treason followed by another decade or so of living in a retirement home, decides to visit the adult daughter (Su Ming-Ming) he scarcely knows. Thus begins his single-minded quest to discover the circumstances of a comrade’s execution and the location of his grave. In flashbacks we discover that Ko was a teacher who organized a study group with several other liberals to discuss banned books.

Gradually, we discover the high price the group and their families had to pay for daring to indulge in so modest a free exchange of ideas. We learn that these victims were subjected to tortures so hideous that the betrayal of friends becomes a virtual inevitability. “Super Citizen Ko,” no mere backward glance, ambitiously and effectively connects the past with the present. Wen and his co-writer Liao Ching-Song raise the whole question of Taiwanese identity in relation to mainland China, the Chiang Kai-shek years and the Japanese occupation that preceded it.

“Super Citizen Ko,” superbly acted, is a tremendously rigorous and thoughtful film with ideas and truths of universal application that ends on a well-earned note of pessimism, not just for the future of Taiwan but the entire world.

Aptly closing the festival Sunday at 7 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater is the dazzling “Cyclo,” from Tran Anh Hung, director of the Oscar-nominated “The Scent of Green Papaya.” It is as sensual as the earlier film, but it boldly leaves “Papaya’s” enclosed though imperiled world of French Indochina to rush into the crowded streets of today’s Ho Chih Minh City, where its young hero (Le Van Loc) survives in the grueling job of a “cyclo,” or pedicab driver. When his vehicle is stolen, he is forced into a stark life of crime to pay for its loss. As the film unfolds in bravura, even operatic style, the cyclo becomes one of four key figures in which we see how the harshness of life in present-day Vietnam can ravage individuals of character and awareness. Among the others are the cyclo’s beautiful sister (Tran Nu Yen Khe, “Papaya’s” star and the director’s wife), who has turned to prostitution. UCLA: (310) 206-FILM. LACMA: (213) 857-6010.

Note: Also screening Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. in the Sunset 5’s “Russian Women Filmmakers” series is “Teenagers,” a dull, overly familiar film about a man working with juvenile delinquents. (213) 848-3500.