‘Best Man’ Leads Festival : Ira Wohl’s sequel to ‘Boy’ is among 30 features in ‘Cinema Judaica.’

“Cinema Judaica ‘97,” the third annual Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, composed of more than 30 films, begins Saturday at 7 p.m. with “Best Man,” a heartfelt sequel to Ira Wohl’s Oscar-winning “Best Boy” 20 years ago. In the first film, Wohl sensitively chronicled how at age 50, his mentally retarded cousin, Philly, had to learn how to leave his aging parents to live in a sheltered community. It was a wrenching, endearing film, and now Wohl catches us up in what’s happened to Philly and his relatives over the past two decades.

The news is good. Philly, approaching 70, is still living in the same facility, and is still a happy and kind man whose horizons have actually expanded over time. Philly is not profoundly retarded, which means he has a good memory, can read and is articulate in a childlike way. “Best Man” is as much about Philly is it about his devoted sister Frances, now widowed, who lives near him. “Best Man” is about the importance of family and tradition and is a celebration of loving kindness in the face of life’s inevitable changes and losses.

What Canadian video maker Wendy Oberlander has to say is so important that it outweighs the unduly arty experimental style in which she expresses it--and also the monotonous flatness of her own narration. Her “Nothing Is to Be Written Here” (Tuesday at 7 p.m.) calls attention to the little-known plight of German and Austrian Jewish refugees in Britain who were declared enemy aliens in 1940; some were shipped off to internment camps in Canada.

There they were subject to terrorizing by Nazi prisoners of war, were under constant fear of repatriation and were subjected to anti-Semitism that reached from camp guards to the leaders of Canada’s government. Oberlander gets her father, who has always been reluctant to discuss the ordeal he experienced as a teenager, to speak of it at length and with candor.

Mark Wexler’s 55-minute “Me & My Matchmaker” (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.) starts out as a straightforward documentary on Chicago matchmaker Irene Nathan, who in the past 16 years has been responsible for 200 Jewish marriages, only four of which have ended in divorce. But then Nathan, who is as wise as she is warm, turns the tables on Wexler (son of master cinematographer Haskell Wexler) when she starts asking him why a good-looking, nice half-Jewish man of 39 like him has never been married.

It would seem that both Nathan and most especially Wexler have learned more about themselves and each other than they at first expected to. Along the way we meet a number of Irene’s clients, both male and female, most of them attractive and intelligent, and two women, both Irene’s clients, whom Wexler takes out and who have to wonder about the line blurring between filmmaking and life.

Above all, you come away impressed by Nathan’s self-knowledge, honesty, directness, tact and commitment to her clients and convinced that in this hectic, modern world she is performing an invaluable service.

In the past year there have been several documentaries that give warm, sympathetic yet objective views of Hasidic life. Zalisa Rabin, while respectful of Hasidic commitment, in her one-hour drama “Nick and Rachel” (Wednesday at 9 p.m.) suggests how oppressive that lifestyle is, especially for women. It tells of the impact of non-Hasidic Nick (Alex Draper) and the demure Rachel (Sabrina Boudot) have upon each other when Nick starts helping out at her father’s jewelry store, where she also works. Rabin is an assured, graceful storyteller with a gentle touch. Playing with “Nick and Rachel” is Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn’s witty, assured 35-minute “Fairfax Fandango,” an unalloyed delight in which a lovely and vivacious stand-up comic (Lou Thornton, a name to remember) finds herself attracted to the young architecture student next door (Robert Patrick Benedict), who happens to be Orthodox.

Joseph Dorfman’s “Arguing the World” (Monday at 4:15 p.m. at the Town Center 5), a lively, absorbing account of four profoundly influential thinkers--all of them Jews born into poverty, all City College of New York students who were were shaped by the politics and economics of the ‘30s and who became known as members of the New York Intellectuals. They are eminent sociologist Nathan Glazer; political essayist Irving Kristol, a key intellectual architect of the Reagan and Gingrich “revolutions”; Irving Howe, literary critic and leading voice of the left, a loyalist to the socialist ideal all four once embraced; and major social theorist Daniel Bell, a man of the liberal center.

“Arguing the World” is as brisk and to the point as its brilliant subjects, but it’s the late Diana Trilling who has the best line in regard to the predominantly male New York Intellectuals group as a whole: “The were never interested in women except for sexual conquest.” (For full schedule and further information: Music Hall: (310) 274-6869; Town Center 5: (818) 981-9811.

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The American Cinematheque continues at Raleigh Studios its daunting “Really Long Film Series” with Bela Tarr’s seven-hour “Satantango” (1994), a darkly comic saga of the disintegration of an Hungarian farming collective (Friday at 7:15 p.m.) and Manoel de Oliveira’s “The Satin Slipper” (1985), a seven-hour film within a play by Paul Claudel about a love between a Spanish conquistador and the wife of a provincial governor (screening in two parts, Saturday at 7:15 p.m. and Sunday at 6:15 p.m.) (213) 466-FILM.

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s stunning “Antonio Gaudi” (1985) returns by popular demand to the Nuart for two more special screenings, Saturday and Sunday at noon only. This is a 72-minute homage to the Catalan architect whose buildings--Art Nouveau carried to glorious extremes--are every bit as undulating as those sand dunes in Teshigahara’s classic “Woman in the Dunes.” Accompanied by a beguiling score by the late Japanese master Toru Takemitsu. (310) 478-6379.

“Let’s Kill All the Lawyers,” a talky, tedious satire on attorney excesses, opens Friday at the Monica 4-Plex. (310) 394-9741. Craig Schlattman’s “The Seller” is also overly talky, a “Lolita” variation in which a used car dealer (Brian Brophy) coming apart kills a tiresome couple who refuse to buy the last car on his lot and then hits the road with their 12-year-old daughter (Kathy Morozova). Brophy and Morozova are fine, but the picture right from the start is too leaden and further weighed down with improbabilities to work. (213) 617-0268.

LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd., presents “Take Me to Your Leader,” a film and video series presented in conjunction with the current exhibition of selections from Jeffrey Vallance’s “Nixon Museum” and Vicente Razo’s “Museo Salinas.” The first program will be presented tonight at 8 p.m. and again on Jan. 15; the second on Dec. 18 and Jan. 22. (213) 957-1777.