Latin Confidential : Neo-noir ‘Belly Up’ is part of ‘Contemporary Latin American Films’ festival.

The UCLA Film Archive’s engrossing “Contemporary Latin American Films” continues tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with the U.S. premiere of Beto Brant’s nifty neo-noir “Belly Up.” It is not only a worthy candidate for American distribution but also for a Hollywood remake.

Two crooks--a seen-it-all professional assassin, Alfredo (Wolney de Assis, a wonderful actor), and a young novice, Toninho (Murilo Benecio)--are stuck in a seedy dive in a border town adjacent to Paraguay awaiting word from their boss as to when to make a hit. Whiling away the time at the bar, Alfredo begins talking about his fearless but ill-fated ultra-macho pal Mucio (Chico Diaz), whose story unfolds in flashbacks.

Based on a short story by Marcal Aquino, “Belly Up” is drenched in low-down exotic atmosphere and signals Brant, in a singularly confident feature debut, as a name to remember.

The vintage woman’s picture is alive and well--in Patagonia. That’s the beautiful but desolate region to which the heroine (Assumpta Serna) of “Stolen Moments” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) comes--the year is 1947--with her much older husband (Jorge Rivera Lopez), doctor and a conservative, possessive type.

Serna’s ravishing, vulnerable Letty has only one escape: the movies--her stolen moments. When a mysterious handsome stranger (Francois-Eric Gendron) materializes, Letty gets carried away, projecting fantasies inspired by the silver screen. Writer-director Oscar Barney Finn dedicates his sweepingly, amusingly romantic saga to his mother, but his film is a homage to the formidable Serna, whose Letty is alternately foolish, gallant and adorable.

The first two-thirds of Patricio Guzman’s “The Battle of Chile” recorded a nation’s hurtling toward chaos with such a sense of tragic inevitability that the third part, “The Power of the People,” which screens with Part 2 on Sunday at 7 p.m., seems anticlimactic. But as it unfolds we become aware that it is not intended as a continuation of what has gone before but rather an examination of Chile’s revolutionary process under Salvador Allende.

Part 3 is first a classic confrontation between haves and have-nots as the working people begin to resist the truckers’ strike that began in October 1972 backed by the upper classes and designed to paralyze the country as a way of undermining Allende. Most important, it is an exultant depiction of people becoming politicized and taking charge of their own destinies. (310) 206-FILM.

*

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen series presents tonight at 7:30 at Raleigh Studios’ Chaplin Theater a sneak preview of Darren Stein’s affectionate and funny “Sparkler.” Stein will make an appearance. The film offers Park Overall and Veronica Cartwright in to-die-for roles as two women of wisdom and vulnerability nearing 40.

The Cinematheque’s “Fast Forward: Recent French Filmmaking, 1986-1998,” continues Friday at 7:15 p.m. with Olivier Assayas’ “HHH--Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien,” a comprehensive, in-depth documentary on the master Taiwanese filmmaker. Hou has won international acclaim for such films as “Dust in the Wind” (1987), a detached yet compassionate telling of a rural couple seeking a better life in Taipei, and “A City of Sadness” (1989), an epic-scale saga of the emergence of postwar Taiwan told through the lives of one family.

A short, compact man who turns 50 this year, Hou is highly articulate and deeply reflective, explaining how he grew up in a Cantonese family that arrived in 1949 believing its stay would be only temporary. He tells how his Taiwanese nationality, combined with a sense of mainland cultural identity, has shaped his work.

Jacques Rivette’s 1988 “The Gang of Four,” which follows at 9:30 p.m., is his usual fiercely demanding interplay of art and life. In it, a group of young acting students become caught up in the mystery and danger engulfing a former colleague and housemate.

As long (160 minutes) and grueling as it is, “The Gang of Four” is worth the effort, and Rivette’s young actresses lighten the journey with their loveliness, talent and individuality.

A program of recent French short films screens Saturday at 7:15 p.m. and will be followed at 9:30 p.m. with Assayas’ amusing 1996 “Irma Vep,” a homage to radiant and versatile Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung--and a blast at contemporary French filmmaking. Assayas displays an intimate, informal style and a sharp sense of proportion that allows him to have some fun, score some points and then wrap it all up before overstaying his welcome. “Irma Vep” is as effortless as a shrug and boasts a film buff’s dream cast.

Jean-Pierre Leaud, all but unintelligible in English (which doesn’t much matter, as it turns out), plays a washed-up, burnt-out New Wave director who has a not-bad idea: to star Cheung in a film based on Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial, “Les Vampires.” Cheung would play Feuillade’s super-villainess Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire). Cheung has the figure for a black latex bodysuit and head mask--Irma’s standard gear--in which only her expressive eyes and mouth are visible, and is an action star as well as splendid actress. But from the moment Cheung, who is in effect playing herself, arrives in Paris, everything, alas, goes wrong. (213) 466-FILM.

*

UC Irvine’s unprecedented retrospective “Post-Colonial Classics of the Korean Cinema,” running on weekends through April 3, opens officially Friday at 8 p.m. with a gala highlighted by the presentation of the 45-minute “The Public Prosecutor and the Teacher.” The film is a 1948 silent melodrama, with live narration by Sin Ch’ul. Sin is the last surviving narrator of Korea’s silent era, which extended after the advent of sound.

Among the films screening over the weekend in 100 Humanities Instruction Building are Byun Young-joo’s “Murmuring” (1995) and its sequel “Habitual Sadness,” a pair of remarkable documentaries on the so-called “comfort women” who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese during World War II. Of the estimated 80,000 such women, some 65,000 were Korean. “Murmuring” introduces us to six elderly “comfort women” living in Sharing House, a shelter established for them by Buddhist monks, and three other “comfort women” sent to China by the Japanese and still unable to return to Korea. (Byun discovered seven more such women, but the Chinese government would let her film only three of them.)

Not surprisingly, these women have terrible stories to tell, of having to service as many as 20 men a day, of suffering venereal and other diseases that left them barren, of returning home only to be treated as outcasts. Shame kept them silent for decades, but by the ‘90s, official Japanese denials of their very existence and growing feminist activism have inspired them to speak out, not only for financial reparations but also to make sure that their experiences are not lost to history.

They are a hardy lot, appealing in their forthrightness, resilience and humor.

Although framed by the dying of one of the most vibrant women, a talented artist whom we meet in the first of the two films, the subsequent “Habitual Sadness” tries for an upbeat note as the women find more contentment in their new Sharing House, an impressive residence in the countryside where the women can grow vegetables and raise chickens in an idyllic setting. (714) 824-1992.

*

Note: The Midnight Special Bookstore, 1318 3rd. St. Promenade, Santa Monica, will present “Documental,” Saturday at 7 and 9 p.m., two different programs of documentary and experimental films and videos. (310) 394-6123.