‘Judaica,’ ‘Im Kwon-Taek’ Top the List

As the AFI Film Fest winds down, the Im Kwon-Taek series continues at USC and “Cinema Judaica ‘96: The Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival” begins Sunday at the Music Hall, both with plenty to offer serious moviegoers.

“Im Kwon-Taek: The Heart of Korean Cinema” confirms what film festivals have long suggested with occasional Im offerings: He is a great director, a world-class filmmaker with a masterful, elegiac style and a remarkable understanding of the human condition.

Among the Im films screening are three masterpieces, starting with “Sopyonje” (Friday at 9:30 p.m. in Room 108, George Lucas Building, USC). Screened at the Korean Cultural Center in June 1994, the superb “Sopyonje” is a stark tale about a hard-drinking, hard-driving master of the plaintive pansori music who wanders the countryside with his two foster children. As painful as it is profound, the 1993 film reveals the virtually limitless sacrifices an art form can demand of its practitioners.

“Surrogate Mother” (Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Korean Cultural Center, 5505 Wilshire Blvd.) is a beautiful, harrowing period tale about a 17-year-old virgin selected by a handsome nobleman to bear the son his wife cannot. The nobleman loves his wife, but he and the virgin unfortunately fall passionately in love. This bleakly exquisite 1986 film is permeated with Im’s concern for traditional beliefs and customs, which in this case are steeped in superstitions and practices both absurd and cruel. Like countless films of various Eastern nationalities before it, “Surrogate Mother” is a comment on the often horrific low status of women in Asian cultures.

The series concludes with the world premiere of Im’s latest film, “Festival” (Sunday at 7 p.m. in USC’s Norris Theater, with Im in attendance). It is surely one of Im’s most complex yet most optimistic works, laced with considerable humor both dark and light. It immediately brings to mind Juzo Itami’s “The Funeral” in its elaborate traditional funeral ceremony unfolding amid an increasingly raucous atmosphere yet has considerably more depth and range than the Itami film, fine as it is.

The versatile Ahn Sung-Kee stars as a highly acclaimed novelist who returns home for the funeral of his 80-year-old mother, a peasant woman and early widow who raised seven children on her own. Because of the novelist’s fame, the funeral attracts not only a large extended family and all the nearby villagers but also government and cultural dignitaries.

There is no small resentment among the novelist’s relatives for his having acquired fame and fortune from his frankly autobiographical books, and worsening the situation is the unexpected, unwelcome appearance of the dead woman’s flashy, bitter, hard-drinking illegitimate granddaughter. Amid a virtual documentary-like account of the funeral’s intricate ceremonies and an escalating carnival atmosphere, Im intersperses an enchanting fairy tale that turns upon the notion that in dying the grandmother is adding years and wisdom to the novelist’s young daughter. A parable of life and death, “Festival” is a triumph of the mastery of a wide range of tones.

For full schedule and information: (213) 740-2991.

Among Cinema Judaica’s opening-day attractions are two outstanding films. Ulf von Mechow’s “Lovers in Minsk” (at 2:30 p.m.) is a documentary that plays like a fictional narrative as we learn of a Nazi lieutenant, in charge of a forced labor camp of ghetto prisoners, who falls in love with a pretty 17-year-old German Jew--and who ends up saving her and some two dozen others from extermination. The subsequent fate of the lovers is the stuff of great novels.

Drawing inspiration from Sholem Aleichem and Marc Chagall, Efim Gribov, with his folkloric “We Are Going to America” (at 4 p.m.), creates a joyous, tumultuous hallucinatory odyssey as a throng of shtetl Jews embark upon a lengthy, arduous trip to the ships that are to take them to freedom in the United States.

Information: (213) 962-1976.

The Grande 4-Plex’s American Independent series continues Friday with the dreary, forgettable “Intimate Betrayal,” about a man’s revenge upon another man for taking his girl. None of these people seem worth caring about.

Information: (213) 617-0268.

Today’s AFI schedule appears on F3.