13th Edition of AFI Fest Begins on a High Note

The 13th annual AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival opens tonight at 7:30 at the Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., with the U.S. premiere of “The Cider House Rules,” based on the John Irving novel.

The nine-day event will be composed of four principal sections: New Directions at the Vogue Theater, 6675 Hollywood Blvd.; European Film Showcase (El Capitan Theater, 6838 Hollywood Blvd.); Latin American Series (Vogue); and Documentary (Egyptian, El Capitan and Vogue). Festival headquarters will be at the Egyptian.

Festival-goers will be hard put to find a more accomplished and satisfying film than Friday’s very first offering, “Set Me Free” (Egyptian, Friday, 10:30 a.m.; Saturday, 6:30 p.m.), French-Canadian filmmaker Lea Pool’s tender and perceptive coming-of-age story, set in Montreal in 1963. A remarkable young actress, Karine Vanesse, stars as the lovely and intelligent Hanna, daughter of an unmarried Catholic woman and a Jewish emigre. Hanna, who has an older brother, Paul (Alexandre Merineau), is entering puberty in a loving but tense and fragile household. Her mother (Pascale Bussieres), who had dreams of becoming a fashion designer, is instead a sweatshop seamstress who comes home exhausted only to have to spend her evenings typing out the poetry dictated to her by her lover, Hanna’s father (Miki Manoljovic), a Polish-born Holocaust survivor too proud to hold down a steady job.

“The Mao Game” (Vogue, Friday, 4:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 9:30 p.m.), one of the highlights of the Seattle International Film Festival earlier this year, is a tour de force for young Joshua Miller, who wrote, directed and stars in this adaptation of his novel about growing up in an emotion-charged, conflict-ridden Hollywood family. Miller’s 18-year-old Jordan, aimless and given to drug sprees, becomes the center of a tug-of-war between his mother, a self-absorbed and struggling soap opera actress (Kirstie Alley, in a terrific risk-taking portrayal) and his grandmother (Piper Laurie, at her most luminous), a free-spirited celebrated photographer. She is Jordan’s key hope for attaining stability and maturity, a life force whose health is nevertheless irrevocably waning. “The Mao Game” is a slice of side-street Hollywood life charged with extravagant personalities, economic and emotional instability, but also wise humor and redeeming love.

Friday evening brings a solid double feature at the Egyptian, a pair of foreign films that surely have more impact on home ground. From Finland, Olli Saarela’s “Ambush” (Friday, 7:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 10:30 a.m.) is a classic war picture with a love story in the foreground. Handsome Eero (Peter Franzen) and pretty Kaarina (Irina Bjorklund) are beginning to fall in love just as World War II overtakes them and sends both into battle, he as a brave lieutenant and she as an army nurse. The love scenes are tender and erotic, the battle scenes flawlessly staged, and “Ambush” emerges as affecting and wholly accessible, but it is as conventional as it is well-crafted. Although satisfying, it hasn’t the scope and power of Pekka Parikka’s “Winter War” (“Talvisota”) of a decade ago.

Jan Hrebejk’s “Cozy Dens” (Friday, 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, 3:30 p.m.) is a bittersweet nostalgic comedy set in Prague amid the relatively good life that was destroyed by the Soviet invasion in August 1968. It’s a wry comedy of family life that opens at Christmas 1967 and centers on two families of differing political views living reasonably amicably in a comfortable, spacious old duplex in a beautiful neighborhood. Not surprisingly, there’s a mutual attraction between the son of a conservative and simplistic military officer and the daughter of a liberal-minded former member of the resistance. These young people are members of Hungary’s rebellious “flower children,” who were to be hard hit by the invasion. This heartfelt, increasingly somber film pays tribute to all those who fled the Soviet occupation--and those who simply “disappeared.”

Petra Katharina Wagner’s “Oskar und Leni” (El Capitan, Sunday, 9:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 4 p.m.) surely will rank among the festival’s best films. Wistful, charming and venturesome in style, it tells of an Olympic swimming champ turned convicted jewel thief named Oskar (a strong, taciturn Christian Redl). Once paroled, Oskar encounters Leni (Anna Thalbach) on a U-Bahn train and quotes Shakespeare as he gently kisses her. They part, and the smitten Leni--an assembly-line pastry decorator who supplements her meager income by working as part of a terrible nightclub act and as a prostitute--spends much of the time searching for the enigmatic Oskar. The result is a romantic comedy at once sophisticated and wise.

This year’s festival is wide-ranging, offering numerous related events, and among its highlights is the Los Angeles premiere of a restored version of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” (1924) Saturday at 3 p.m. at the Egyptian.

Among the films arriving with positive advance notice are Mexico’s “Under a Spell” (Vogue, Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.; Oct. 29, 4 p.m.) and India’s “Vanaprastham, the Last Dance” (Egyptian, Monday, 6:30 p.m.; Wednesday, 7 p.m.), which, like “Set Me Free,” “Ambush” and “Cozy Dens,” is in competition. (323) 520-2000.

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The UCLA Film Archive presents “Everywhere Desire: The Films of Youssef Chahine,” a retrospective of Egypt’s most internationally renowned director. Running through Nov. 2 at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater, it opens tonight with “Alexandria . . . Why?,” the first installment in Chahine’s exuberant and engaging autobiographical trilogy. It introduces us to the teenage Yehia, who has fallen in love with the movies and dreams of studying at the Pasadena Playhouse as World War II rages on. This rich and endearing film also embraces two cross-cultural love stories, between an Egyptian aristocrat and a British soldier, and a Jewish woman and an Arab man. (310) 206-FILM.

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Kevin Brownlow has long been a leading film historian and preservationist, but early in his professional life he and production designer Andrew Mollo collaborated on “It Happened Here” (1969) and “Winstanley” (1975), notably persuasive and uncompromising period films that were all the more remarkable for having made on shoestring budgets. The Nuart, which presented “Winstanley” in May 1983, is bringing it back Tuesday through Oct. 28, along with the U.S. premiere of the uncut version of “It Happened Here.”