Liberating Tales

The second annual Freedom Film Festival, the American Cinema Foundation’s showcase of films from Central and Eastern Europe focusing on themes of democracy and freedom, again presents extraordinary and venturesome pictures that offer a firsthand sense of what’s happening in some of the most volatile parts of the world. The festival commences tonight at Paramount Studios with an 8 p.m. invitational premiere of Valery Todorovsky’s “The Land of the Deaf,” which screens to the public at 1:15 p.m. Saturday at the Monica 4-Plex. The theater is the festival’s main venue and will also screen similarly themed films from Latin America. (Some of the Latin American films will be screened in the Thalberg Building at Sony Pictures Studios.)

On Friday, “Korczak” will screen at the Monica at 9:15 p.m., launching a salute to its director, Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s premier senior filmmaker, as well as a 25th anniversary tribute to its producer, Germany’s Regina Ziegler, who will be honored with a retrospective at the Goethe Institute, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., along with other venues.

“The Land of the Deaf” is a soaring romantic fable set in the treacherous underworld of present-day Moscow. Aboard a sleek gambling ship, a lovely young woman, Rita (Chulpan Khamatova), has just realized she’s become collateral for her feckless boyfriend’s gambling debts at the same moment a tempestuous floor-show stripper, Jaja (Dina Korzun), is fired. Jaja whisks Rita away with her and into a dicey existence that finds Rita serving as the “ears” for a hard-of-hearing gangster, while Jaja in turn falls in love with her new friend. The film evolves into a darkly amusing thriller in which the theatrical Jaja dreams of escaping to an imaginary “land of the deaf,” an island paradise. The diminutive Khamatova and the tall Korzun, a gamin type who brings to mind Luise Rainer and the late Dolly Haas, are irresistible, and so is their film.

Goran Paskaljevic’s aptly titled “The Powder Keg” (Saturday at the Monica at 5 p.m.) is set in contemporary Belgrade, a place of chaos and danger in which Paskaljevic takes a bleakly comic view of a chain of calamitous encounters between individuals at the end of their tethers. A man goes berserk when a youth, driving without a license, collides with his beloved car, a Beetle he’s treasured for 31 years; two rugged, middle-aged best friends start a truth-telling session that turns lethal; a taxi driver and his passenger, one of whom is as convinced his wife is faithful as the other is certain his spouse is cheating, are caught up in a vignette right out of Lubitsch or Wilder. The film’s most familiar face belongs to Miki Manojlovic as a refugee who returns to make amends to the woman he deserted. “The Powder Keg” is framed by the world-weary observations of a cabaret emcee viewing a society in which a propensity for self-destruction has descended to the most personal levels imaginable.

Possessed of as much of a sense of absurdity as “The Powder Keg” but striking a lighter note is Czech director Petr Zelenka’s freewheeling “Buttoners” (Saturday at the Monica at 7 p.m.), which places the hilarious and the tragic in perspective in considering the history of the world between the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and its 50th anniversary. Within the context of a radio talk show surveying those five decades flows one cockamamie sketch after another; the one that gives this giddy, inspired film its title is especially funny, peeling away the bourgeois propriety of a pair of middle-aged couples whose son and daughter are getting married. Like Paskaljevic, Zelenka wonders whether it’s possible to affirm a link of humanity between people in the face of so much madness.

Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s “Korczak” dramatizes the life of Dr. Janusz Korczak, an enduringly influential pioneer in the cause of children and their rights, who has been called the first actual pediatrician. His destiny was to care for 200 orphans in the Nazi-era Warsaw Ghetto. The 1991 release represents yet another triumph for Wajda, long regarded as one of the world’s greatest directors for such films as “Ashes and Diamonds” and “Man of Marble,” to name only the two among his more than 30 pictures that are most familiar to American audiences.

The formidable, manifold task facing Wajda was above all to make Korczak’s fate an affirmation of life and of human dignity in the face of inevitable tragedy--and to resist sentimentalizing the children. In succeeding at evoking a genuine catharsis rather than merely depression, Wajda was strongly aided by two longtime colleagues, his writer Agnieszka Holland (an important director in her own right) and actor Wotjek Pszoniak, best known for his creepy, paranoid Robespierre in Wajda’s 1982 “Danton.” Holland’s brilliant screenplay provides Pszoniak with a great role as Korczak, famed for his children’s radio show, who could easily have escaped Poland but chose to stay in the ghetto, ultimately to prepare his young charges for death. Not only is “Korczak” one of the great Holocaust films but also a great film, period. (310) 843-0136.

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The American Cinematheque’s sixth annual “Recent Spanish Cinema,” which includes a retrospective of the films of Carlos Saura--Spain’s preeminent veteran director--and a showcase for female filmmakers, runs through March 13 at the Egyptian Theater. The retro opens Friday at 7 p.m. with a new print of “Carmen” (1983), with Saura present. It will be followed at 9:45 p.m. with Manuel Gutierrez Aragon’s “Things I Left in Havana,” a wry look at the struggle of three Cuban sisters to forge a new life in Madrid, where they have been given shelter somewhat reluctantly by their aunt. Their struggle for survival becomes bitter and desperate, and their emotions a mixture of homesickness and rage over the Castro regime. The focal point is the youngest sister, Nena (Violeta Rodriguez), an aspiring actress, and her love for a fellow Cuban emigre (“Strawberry and Chocolate’s” Jorge Perugorria), a handsome fellow who must trade on his looks to survive. Ironically, “Things I Left in Havana” leaves you with the impression that even though Spain for these women is “the mother country,” their life is as hard, possibly even harder, in Madrid than it would be in Los Angeles. There will be a post-screening discussion with Gutierrez Aragon and his producer, Gerardo Herrera.

Saura will also appear at the 4 p.m. Saturday screening of his 1975 masterpiece “Cria Cuervos” (Raise Ravens). Perhaps his finest film, it is a sensitive portrait of a mother-daughter relationship during the height of Franco’s regime. The mother and the daughter as an adult are both played by Geraldine Chaplin, representing her finest work. (323) 466-FILM.

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Brion Rockwell’s somewhat autobiographical “Where the Air Is Cool and Dark” is a heartfelt study of a former logger and recovering drug addict (Emmanuel Malcolm Martinez) who returns to his Olympic Peninsula hometown, resuming work as a logger in hopes of making a film to be financed by his pal’s marijuana crops. Very swiftly he falls in with epic-scale substance abusers. This is an admirably earnest, honest movie about terrifically off-putting people; it screens Friday and Saturday only, at midnight at the Sunset 5, where it launches a weekly series of new independent features in that time slot. (323) 848-3500.