‘GRIDLOCK’d’ Premiere to Open Festival

The fifth Pan African Film Festival, composed of more than 50 films, opens Wednesday at the Magic Johnson Theaters at 7 p.m. with a gala premiere of Vondie Curtis Hall’s “GRIDLOCK’d.” In it, Tim Roth and the late Tupac Shakur play Detroit musicians deciding to kick their heroin habits only to get caught up in bureaucratic hell in order to qualify for a drug rehabilitation program.

Although vital and punchy and even darkly funny, “GRIDLOCK’d” is also slick and synthetic. Nevertheless, it makes clear the tragic loss of the greatly talented and versatile Shakur. The knowledge of his death shortly after the film was made reverberates throughout.

Also screening at 7 p.m. is Cheick Oumar Sissoko’s shimmering “Guimba,” a folk tale from Mali about a tyrant of a legend with unmistakable parallels to modern-day dictators. When Guimba (Falaba Issa Traore) demands one of his nobles divorce his wife so that his spoiled, capricious dwarf son (Lamine Diallo) can marry her, his dictatorship starts crumbling. Despite easy-to-read subtitles, “Guimba” is hard to follow, but it is worth the effort for, like so many screen epics the world over, its meaning becomes clear enough at the finish. This is a beautiful, poetic film, rich in traditional costumes and music and shot through with earthy humor.

Screening Saturday at 8:25 p.m. is Felix de Rooy’s charming yet bitter parable “Ava & Gabriel,” set in an irresistibly picturesque Curacao in 1948. Cliff San-A-Jong stars as Gabriel, a Hague-educated painter from Suriname, who goes to Curacao to paint a mural of the Madonna in a local church whose bishop is outraged at the notion that she should be depicted as a black woman. This is just the beginning of the scandals as Gabriel chooses the lush, beautiful Ava (Nashaira Desbarida) for his model. De Rooy and co-writer Normand de Palm depict a rigidly structured colonial outpost in which integration is only superficial and lightness of skin tone a cherished social criterion. Seen on another level, Gabriel is also the Archangel Gabriel.

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Legendary Mississippi Delta blues man Robert Johnson, murdered in 1938 at the age of 27 in rural Mississippi, apparently by a jealous husband, left virtually no account of himself outside of 29 songs that have conferred immortality upon him.

Luckily, filmmaker Peter Meyer was able to locate several of Johnson’s boyhood friends and fellow musicians to help illuminate Johnson’s short life and his musical virtuosity, which one friend describes aptly as “playing a guitar like a piano.” So skillful was Johnson that he became enveloped in the famous myth that he sold his soul to the devil in order to play so well.

“Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl?: The Life and Music of Robert Johnson” (Sunday at 3:35 p.m.) is a remarkably evocative work in which it would seem that the paucity of material on Johnson served only to further challenge and inspire Meyer. For full schedule of screenings and related events, call (213) 896-8221.

Civil Unrest: Srdjan Dragojevic’s “Pretty Villages, Pretty Flames” (tonight at 8 at the Museum of Tolerance, 9786 W. Pico Blvd.), the Yugoslav official Oscar entry, is a bravura antiwar film. It is loosely based on an actual incident in which Serbs hole themselves up in a tunnel, trapped by Muslims, ultimately placing lifelong friends on opposite sides of a senseless and bloody struggle. Within this framework, Dragojevic creates a surreal, corrosive slapstick tragedy, shifting between 1980 and 1992. Free admission. (310) 859-4537.

Rape in Brooklyn: No wonder Jonathan Demme and Barbet Schroeder have joined forces in presenting Tim McCann’s knockout debut feature, “Desolation Angels,” which screens Wednesday at 8 p.m. at Raleigh Studios in the American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen series. It is an utterly compelling portrait of depth and complexity of a young Brooklyn blue-collar worker-student (Michael Rodrick) confronted with the strong probability that his girlfriend (Jennifer Thomas) has been raped by a college acquaintance of his. Rodrick gives us a mesmerizing portrayal of a young man in the grip of pain and rage too intense to comfort his girlfriend or to take any constructive course of action. “Desolation Angels” is a thoroughly unsettling and sensitive drama of acute psychological insight. (213) 466-FILM.