Elie Wiesel and Candid Talk in Judaica Fest

Among the films screening in the richly diverse “Cinema Judaica ‘96” series currently at the Music Hall is Melissa Hacker’s “My Knees Were Jumping” (Wednesday at 7:15), yet another remarkable documentary bringing to light yet another largely unfamiliar aspect of the Holocaust.

One of the most reprehensible aspects of the Holocaust was how many countries, especially in the West and including the United States, refused entry to European Jews desperate to emigrate as the Nazi terror escalated. By 1938, Great Britain relented to the extent of permitting entry to some 9,000 Jewish children--90% of whom would never again see their parents.

Hacker’s point of departure is the first U.S. reunion in New York in 1990 of the children of the Kindertransport, at which time Hacker’s own mother, Ruth Morley, spoke of her own wrenching experiences.

“My Knees Were Jumping” is an account of a catharsis, as Morley and others speak of their survivors’ guilt, often for the first time in detail to each other and to their own children, whose own lives have been affected by having parents who experienced terrible, dislocating losses. “My Knees Were Jumping” is an ennobling, healing experience of the utmost sensitivity and eloquence.

Similarly impressive and powerful, Judit Elik’s “To Speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel” (Thursday at 7:15 p.m.) follows the great writer whom Elik calls “the conscience of the Holocaust,” on a journey to his hometown village of Sighetu Marmatiei in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania, once part of Hungary and now part of Romania, and on to Auschwitz, which Wiesel survived. His father, sister and mother did not.

On this, Wiesel’s fourth visit to Sighetu, the Nobel Prize-winner unexpectedly encounters the 91-year-old brother of his family’s physician, who hid out in a nearby forest for a year. Wiesel and this elderly man, who entrusts Wiesel with precious family documents, were the only survivors of the April, 1944, deportation of the Jews in the village, which hardly bares a trace of their existence there.

In an audacious move, the festival includes Philip B. Roth’s candid, alternately outrageous and poignant “I Was a Jewish Sex Worker” (Saturday at 7:15 p.m.) in which Roth chronicles his ongoing struggle to integrate his Judaism, his homosexuality and his family.

His documentary includes an interview with his father, who can accept his son’s homosexuality only by barely acknowledging it, and also includes some sexually explicit scenes of his work as an erotic masseur and his one heterosexual experience (with performance artist and former porn actress Annie Sprinkle).

Information: (310) 274-6869.

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The Rifleman: The American Cinematheque’s “Alternative Screen” presents Thursday, at 8 p.m. at Raleigh Studios, “The Delicate Art of the Rifle,” without a doubt one of the best American independent movies of the year.

It is amazing how the filmmakers--T. Todd Flinchum, Stephen Grant, D.W. Harper and Alicia Kratzer--manage to wrest fresh, unexpected impact from what is at least the third film inspired by/or about Charles Whitman, the University of Texas student who 30 years ago climbed a tower and started shooting.

This film’s key figure is David Grant’s Jay, a sweet, nerdy sophomore whose passion is his work as a technician at his university’s superbly equipped theater. Some 30 minutes into the film, Jay’s roommate, Walt Whitman (!) (played by Stephen Grant), a campus hero, starts shooting.

This film bristles with dark absurdist humor, and Flinchum makes stunning metaphorical use of a virus that wipes out every trace of a person’s existence to give the tragedy fresh meaning.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.

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Family Animators: Filmforum presents, Saturday and Sunday at noon at the Nuart, “Emily and Faith Hubley Come to Hollywood,” two different programs of work by these major mother-and-daughter animators, highlighted by Faith Hubley’s magical 25-minute autobiography, “My Universe: Inside Out.”

Information: (310) 478-6379.