‘Poland ‘56’ Leads Freedom Festival

The American Cinema Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization formed to promote films addressing social values and the worth of the individual, launches its Freedom Film Festival tonight at 6:30 at Paramount Studios with a premiere gala featuring Filip Bajon’s powerful and dynamic “Poland ’56.” A middle-aged man recalls the events of June 28, 1956, when at the age of 12 he and his best friend become caught up in the chaos of a failed workers’ strike.

The increasingly cataclysmic events of the day unfold with a documentary-like immediacy that recalls in its impact such Rossellini classics as “Open City” and “Germany Year Zero.” The festival runs Friday through Wednesday at the Monica 4-Plex. (310) 394-9741.

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The American Cinematheque opens its Recent Spanish Cinema series tonight at 7:15 p.m. with the Los Angeles premiere of Manuel Gomez Pereira’s sweeping romantic comedy “Love Can Seriously Damage Your Health,” which traces the tempestuous secret love affair through 30 years between a middle-class youth, Santi (Gabino Diego and Juanjo Puigcorbe), who works his way up through the air force to become a key security aide to the king of Spain, and Diana (Penelope Cruz and Ana Belen), a famous society beauty who moves from one glittery marriage to the next. She (more than he) realizes that what keeps the flame alive is the impossibility of actually ever living together. This is the kind of inspired charmer Hollywood has pretty much forgotten how to make.

Screening at 9:30 p.m. is Jose Luis Borau’s 1975 “Poachers.” Inspired by Franco’s remark that “Spain is a peaceful forest,” Borau takes us into an actual forest and, in a bleak, often savagely funny allegory, shows us that it, like Spain at the time, is anything but tranquil. Borau is scheduled to appear after the film.

Emilio Martinez-Lazaro’s 1997 “Backroads” (Friday at 9:45 p.m.) is a highly affecting depiction of a father-son relationship in which a teenager (Fernando Ramallo) moves from contempt and resentment to love and respect for his ne’er-do-well vagabond father (Antonio Resines, in a remarkable portrayal). Significantly, the year is 1974, a time when a rigid sense of class and propriety were still in full force. It will be preceded by a sneak preview of Alejandro Amenabar’s fantasy thriller “Open Your Eyes.”

Pilar Miro’s 1996 “The Dog in the Manger” (Saturday at 7:15 p.m. and March 20 at 7:15 p.m.) is a sly and sumptuous filming of the Lope de Vega classic romantic comedy, in which a gorgeous Neapolitan countess (Emma Suarez), much concerned with her status and reputation, is thrown into a tizzy when when she falls inconveniently in love with her dashing and clever secretary (Carmelo Gomez). Jose Luis Borau’s 1997 “Master Nobody,” his first film in a decade, is a complex, highly verbal philosophical comedy in which an intense professor (Rafael Alvarez) turns his life upside down when he attempts to follow the seemingly mystical message of an elderly poet (a robust and witty Jose Castillo). Borau will discuss the film following its screening. (213) 466-FILM.

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Heddy Honigmann’s “O Amor Natural,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Grande 4-Plex, celebrates the erotic poetry of famed Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), which was not published until after his death, apparently because he feared some might regard his work as pornographic. But as read by a cross-section of elderly Rio citizens, all of whom admired him--and clearly none of them prudes--they are truly beautiful, envisioning love and sex as one and the act of love as cosmic as it is personal. This is a sunny, lovely film, touched by the poignancy of the passing of time. But as one woman remarks of herself and her husband, “We’re old, but we’re not dead!” (213) 617-0268.

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Documentarian Yale Strom will present and discuss his irresistible and poignant “Carpati: 50 Miles, 50 Years” between 3 and 6 p.m. Sunday at Mishkon Tephilo Conservative Synagogue, 206 Main St., Venice. Strom and his cinematographer-editor and co-producer David Notowitz traveled to Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains, once the cradle of the Hasidim and home to nearly a quarter of a million Jews, whose population has dwindled to less than 1,500 because of the Holocaust and subsequent emigration.

Once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the region became part of Czechoslovakia after World War I. Jewish culture there flourished between the wars. After World War II it became part of the Soviet Union, ushering in a long period of hardship, hostility and injustice for Holocaust survivors; it’s now part of Ukraine.

In the shabby, picturesque town of Beregova in 1994, the filmmakers met Zev Godinger, then 66 and much-beloved as “Uncle Zev,” a hearty, outgoing ice cream merchant. Strom ever so gently persuades Godinger to start talking about his tragic past as an Auschwitz survivor and even to travel 50 miles to his birthplace, Vinogradov, which he had not visited in half a century. What Strom and Notowitz are doing so lovingly--and so entrancingly--is to record remnants of a culture on the brink of extinction. A rich part of those remnants is the Jewish music preserved by local Gypsies. Strom makes audiences understand that Gypsies were also sent to Auschwitz and today survive in often severe poverty, and he celebrates their own music as well. (310) 392-3029.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s major Shohei Imamura retrospective continues this weekend in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. Screening tonight at 7 is Imamura’s “Pigs and Battleships” (1961), followed by “Intentions of Murder” (1964). Set in rowdy Yokosuka, Japan, site of a U.S. naval base, “Pigs and Battleships” is a lively entertainment that reveals the impact of a steady stream of U.S. sailors who represent an insidious form of cultural imperialism to this city and its people, particularly an appealing young couple.

In “Intentions of Murder” (1964), also known as “Unholy Desire,” Imamura draws a parallel between animals and people; here, a pair of caged white mice, with one prophetically devouring the other, becomes an all-too-obvious metaphor for the human condition. His heroine (played selflessly by Masumi Harukawa, who put on weight just for this role) is a hefty, much-abused and clumsy woman who gradually falls in love with the man who has raped her but at the same time begins to question her duty to her stupid, cruel husband and his feudalistic family headed by his mother, a tyrannical matriarch.

In “The Insect Woman” (1963), screening Saturday at 7 p.m. with “Vengeance Is Mine” (1979), Imamura also equates humans and animals in their struggle for survival. Invoking a favorite Japanese theme of mother love and sacrifice, it stars Sachiko Hidari, remarkable for her portrayal of a simple country girl transformed into a ruthless bordello madam who becomes more and more like an insect.

Imamura’s vision grew more tragic than angry with “Vengeance Is Mine,” which is based on a true story and tells of a rampaging murderer and thief (Ken Ogata, in a splendid and terrifying portrayal) who manages to elude the police in the autumn of 1963 and proceeds to reveal by flashback how his life took the destructive course it did.

The somewhat misleadingly titled “The Pornographers” (1966), screening Sunday at 7 p.m., is a bravura work in which Imamura attained a crucial sense of wit and detachment. His hapless hero (Shoichi Ozawa) has turned to making pornography and pimping to hold his family together. Considerable social satire emerges as the pornographer’s life starts coming apart, blurring the line between the kinds of films he makes and the life he and his family live. Playing with it is “A Man Vanishes” (1967), in which Imamura turns a documentary on a search for a missing man into a cinema experiment that blurs reality and fiction. (310) 206-FILM.

Note: “Post-Colonial Classics of the Korean Cinema” continues Saturday at UC Irvine. (714) 824-1992. “An Evening With Joseph H. Lewis” (LACMA, Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) will screen the director’s “My Name Is Julia Ross” (1945) and “Terror in a Texas Town” (1958). (213) 857-6010. It’s a presentation of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., and Curtis Hanson, Academy Award-nominated director of “L.A. Confidential” will introduce Lewis. Also participating is Nina Foch, star of “My Name Is Julia Ross.”