‘Tierra del Fuego’ Opens Hitchcock Director’s Series

The American Cinematheque presents at the Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Universal Studios’ second Hitchcock International Director Series Friday through Tuesday, with all the films followed by discussions with their directors. The 8 p.m. series opens with Miguel Littin’s “Tierra del Fuego,” a sweeping, gorgeous-looking historical epic starring “Strawberry and Chocolate’s” Jorge Perugorria as Julius Popper, a gold-seeking Romanian engineer who in 1860 took possession of the Southern tip of South America in the name of his country’s queen. Financed by a stunning, diamond-hard local madam (Ornella Muti), Popper assembles an army of European adventurers to launch a savage conquest that wound up not only destroying the lives of the native population but eventually his own as well.

Tales of folly and cruelty wreaked in Latin America by rapacious Europeans are familiar screen fare, and “Tierra del Fuego” recalls pictures from “Aguirre, Wrath of God” to the current “La Otra Conquista” without adding any new insights to the chronicles of imperialistic exploitation. “Tierra del Fuego,” which tends toward the ponderous, could use some more magical realism. Even so, it is a worthy endeavor from a major visionary filmmaker, a fiery activist whose films include such landmark political allegories “The Jackal” (1969), an unforgettable work from Allende’s Chile, and the venturesome Oscar-nominated “Alsino and the Condor” (1982), the first fiction film produced in Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution.

Screening Saturday is a reprise of Gianni Amelio’s superb 1994 “Lamerica,” in which two Italian crooks find themselves way over their heads in post-communist Albania.

Virtually free of exposition, Otar Iosselliani’s “Farewell, Home Sweet Home” (Monday) is hard to follow but worth the effort as a work of quirky, affecting originality that attests to Iosselliani’s acute powers of observation of people going about their everyday lives. His central figure is a young man (Nico Tarielashvili) who tries to escape life at his family’s palatial country house outside Paris, where his father (Iosselliani) hunts and plays with his toy trains in an amiable alcoholic haze and his mother (Lily Lavina) is a helicopter-hopping businesswoman and major hostess, regaling her guests with operatic arias while her pet stork flaps about. This airy, beguiling film concludes with a graceful ironic flourish.

“Summer Snow” (Tuesday) teams two of the most accomplished women of the Hong Kong cinema, versatile star Josephine Siao and director Ann Hui, who is best known for her superb and harrowing Vietnam Trilogy of the early ‘80s--”Boy from Vietnam,” “The Story of Woo Viet” and “The Boat People.” Siao can clown like a Lucille Ball but here plays it straight as May, an attractive fortysomething Hong Kong woman who is the faultlessly efficient sales manager of a busy trading company--they deal with 56 kinds of toilet paper manufactured in China--and linchpin of her family. Her husband, Bing (Law Kar-yingg), is a sweet but ineffectual civil servant, a driving test examiner who hasn’t the heart to flunk anybody. Their teenage son Allen (Allen Ting) is in the throes of a first love.

May is already hard-pressed with responsibilities when her loving mother-in-law (Tam Sing-hung) suddenly dies, escalating her father-in-law’s (Roy Chiao) descent into senile dementia. How the Sun family copes and how it transforms May, in ways not so easily predicted, makes “Summer Snow,” written with warmth and humor by Chan Man-keung, most rewarding. There will be Short Films Directors Showcase Sunday at 2 p.m., and at 6 p.m., a panel discussion in which the series’ directors will discuss the impact of new technologies on traditional-style filmmaking. (323) 466-FILM.

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The third annual Dances With Films: Festival of the Unknowns presents 50 films of varying lengths and categories Friday through June 29 at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. Among them is James Dunnison’s “Stuff” (Saturday at 9:30 p.m.), the kind of wild, out-there movie--and from Canada yet--that keeps you mining for gold amid the dross inevitable in all film festivals. Max Danger, who resembles David Spade, plays Philip, a would-be punker in the clutches of his crazed mother (Maureen Burgoyne) while working as a hospital orderly. What if Philip should accidentally cause her death at the same time he falls heir to a mysterious ring, coveted by a ruthless killer? The answer is a black comedy of the supernatural, consistently inspired and with hilarious zaniness. DWF: (323) 656-1974; Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500.

Outfest at the Village at the Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place, will screen Wednesday at 7 p.m. John Scagliotti’s 1991 “After Stonewall,” a stirring survey of the gay liberation movement and a companion film to Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg’s 1985 “Before Stonewall” (screened at the Village June 7). Through a blend of interviews and archival footage, it highlights how relations between gay men and lesbians became strained in the hedonistic ‘70s but were bridged with the onslaught of AIDS and the rise of the religious right. While the film makes clear the struggle is far from over, one wishes Scagliotti had ended on a note acknowledging how much hangs in the balance for gay liberation in the upcoming presidential election, not just for the next four years but an entire generation as appointees to the Supreme Court loom in the not-too-distant future. (323) 960-9200.

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The Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., will screen Wednesday and Thursday, June 29, at 8 p.m. “Tarzan of the Apes” (1918) with Elmo Lincoln as a fund-raiser for the preservation of the 1928 reissue version of 1921 serial “The Adventures of Tarzan,” also starring Lincoln. Presented by Marcia Lincoln Rudolph, who has just published a biography of her father, the screen’s first Tarzan. (323) 655-2520.