‘Lucia,’ ‘Moebius’ Among Top Offerings at Latino Fest

The first Los Angeles International Latino Film Festival, which began Wednesday and has Edward James Olmos as its artistic director, will present more than 40 films, old and new, along with other special events through Sunday. A highlight will be a retrospective in honor of the recently deceased major Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.

The festival at the Universal Studios and the Universal City Cinemas offers a rare opportunity to see Humberto Solas’ great three-part revolutionary epic, “Lucia,” centering on three women in three different eras of Cuban history--all of them named Lucia. (It screens Sunday at 11 a.m. in Screening Room 3, Universal Studios.) The films available for preview suggest that the festival is aiming high, and this underlines the need for Latino films to break out into regular release.

“Moebius” (Theater 15, tonight at 6:30 p.m.), a bravura scientific thriller set in a Buenos Aires’ subway, was made by advanced students of the Fundacion Universidad del Cine. When a subway train containing about 30 passengers disappears without a trace, we naturally suspect a hijacking or a supernatural twist is in the offing. But instead the filmmakers pull off a brilliant intellectual tour de force that also moves like lightning.

A mathematician-topographer (Guillermo Angelelli) has his work cut out for him and then some trying to solve the mystery while attempting to persuade the subway’s beleaguered director-general (Roberto Carnaghi) that something way out of the ordinary has occurred.

Jose Araujo’s “Landscapes of Memory” (Theater 17, tonight at 8:30 p.m.) is a boldly surreal allegory in which an elderly man and woman, Antero Marques Araujo (the director’s father) and Maria Emilce Pinto, come to represent all of the peasants of the Serta~o, the hot, dry land of the Northeastern interior of Brazil.

These two not only endure all the hardships, tragedies and exploitation of the poor of this region, but their resilience acquires spiritual dimension, with the woman becoming a female reincarnation of Jesus and the man taking on the role of a biblical prophet. Araujo’s film--his first feature--is starkly beautiful and unique in the way in which religion confronts politics in an original and powerful manner.

Heather Johnston and Gordon Ericson’s lively and impassioned “Lena’s Dreams” (Screening Room 3, Universal Studios, at 6 p.m. Friday) inevitably brings to mind “Anna,” for which Sally Kirkland won an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a famous, no-longer-young Czech actress struggling to survive in Manhattan. Marlene Forte’s beautiful and talented Lena is only 32, but she’s already feeling overcome by desperation.

The flash point for Lena, who is of Cuban American descent, is an audition where she is doubly rejected: too well-bred to play a maid, too ethnic to play her aristocratic employer; never mind that she would easily dazzle in either role. Although Lena’s Latino background is surely limiting, we are able to see in her the plight of every actor attempting to carve out a career and have some kind of life as well. Dreams, Lena is beginning to conclude, can become an addiction.

Andy Garcia’s “Cachao” (Screening Room 2, Universal Studios, at 5 p.m. Saturday) celebrates legendary Cuban bassist and composer Israel (Cachao) Lopez, inventor of the mambo and exiled maestro of Afro-Cuban music. It’s hard to sit still for nearly two hours while Cachao and his colleagues, many as celebrated as he, play one infectious number after the other.

As the film’s director, Garcia has been able to assemble a tribute to Cachao that is the very model of a successful concert film. Garcia has achieved variety through overlapping sound and image, a flurry of vintage stills, astute editing and a conversation with Cachao, a serene, heavyset man in his 70s, and noted London-based Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. “Cachao” has the sensual, seductive flow of the music itself.

The reportedly true incident which inspired Arturo Ripstein’s astonishing “Deep Crimson,” which closes the festival Sunday at 7:30 p.m. in Universal Studios’ Hitchcock Theater, may or may not have been the same one that inspired the notable American film “The Honeymoon Killers.” It scarcely matters, for “Deep Crimson” is so quintessentially Ripstein--a revelation of individuals driven by all-consuming passions--that he might just as easily have imagined it.

Regina Orozco’s Coral is a plump, miserable nurse who links up with Daniel Gimenez Cacho’s Nicolas, a handsome con man who smoothly bilks widows and spinsters. He is obsessed with the fact that he must wear a toupee and is plagued by screeching migraine headaches. But Coral, instead of becoming his victim, overwhelms Nicolas, and they become caught up in a truly mad love that rages lethally out of control.

What sets apart this dark, grisly yet oddly poignant odyssey is that Coral and especially Nicolas possess a remarkable degree of self-awareness of the compulsiveness engulfing them. When the tormented Nicolas screams at a soon-to-be victim: “What do you know of honor and pain?,” the effect is electrifying. (562) 403-2694.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s F.W. Murnau series continues tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with “The Burning Soil” (1922). Written by Thea von Harbou, Willy Haas and Arthur Rosen and photographed superbly by two masters, Fritz Arno Wagner and Karl Freund, this intensely visual film has most likely not been seen in America for 75 years, if it all.

It’s a classic tale of a farmer’s son (Wladimir Gaidrow) who loses his perspective and corrupts his values as he commences social climbing. He marries the widow of a local count and becomes intent on exploiting recently discovered oil deposits on her land.

This is one of those German films in which everyone is touched by an ancient curse and consumed with angst, none more so than our anti-hero, in danger of ending up as lonely and isolated as Nosferatu himself. A film of pictorial grandeur, a Murnau trademark, it’s not as timeless as his more famous films but fascinating anyway. There will be live organ accompaniment by Robert Israel.

“The Burning Soil” will be followed by the also rarely seen “City Girl” (1930). Murnau’s earliest surviving film, “Journey Into the Night,” (1922) will screen Sunday at 7:30 p.m., followed by the Murnau-Robert Flaherty “Tabu” (1931), a silent with a Polynesian score.

Like “White Shadows in the South Seas,” Flaherty’s earlier collaboration with W.S. Van Dyke, “Tabu” represents an attempt to meld documentary and fiction but is more effective. (Both films condemn the corruption of innocent natives by foreigners.) “Tabu” is a Romeo and Juliet-like poetic tragedy set in the South Seas, in which a handsome young pearl diver (Matahi) and a beautiful maiden (Reri) defy the edict that has designated her a virgin princess. The late Floyd Crosby won an Oscar for his superb black-and-white cinematography.

The UCLA Film Archive will launch another retrospective, “Living Idols: The Films of Albert Lewin,” beginning Sunday at 7 p.m. with a screening of “The Moon and Sixpence” (1942). Starring George Sanders, this is an adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Paul Gauguin-inspired novel that so impressed the author that he declared it “a brilliant piece of work.” Lewin was an extraordinarily sophisticated studio filmmaker for ‘40s Hollywood, best known for “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman,” which screens following “The Moon and Sixpence,” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” which screens Tuesday following the 7:30 p.m. screening of “The Private Affairs of Bel Ami,” in which Sanders also stars. (310) 206-FILM.

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Kevin Lewis’ “The Method,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Music Hall, is a silly, sophomoric melodrama about four college students staging a play for their senior thesis. Their director (Nick Sadler) is obsessed with the challenge of making acting really real, and since the play they’re rehearsing is about a bank robbery, you can see where “The Method” is heading. Sadler, Sean Patrick Flanery,Michael Bondies and Tyrin Turner act their heads off. (310) 274-6869.

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Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice, will present Saturday at 8 p.m. a sneak preview of guerrilla filmmaker Jon Moritsugu’s “Fame Whore,” composed of three vignettes about individuals desperate for recognition; from the maker of the memorable “Mod ---- Explosion.” Playing with it is Michael Idemoto and Eric Nakamura’s “Sunsets” (Saturday at 9 p.m.). With an assured, sophisticated style, the filmmakers zero in on three pals during their last summer together in Watsonville, the old agricultural community just below Monterey. For a film with such an easy flow, much humor and a lack of pretense, “Sunsets” is actually reflective and tough-minded. (310) 822-3006.

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* L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd., presents Friday at 8 p.m. its second annual Super Super-8 Film Festival, featuring 14 films selected from 120 submissions. (213) 957-1777.

* Filmform will present the concluding portions of Stan Brakhage’s “Arabics” Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE. (213) 526-2911.