A Hard Life in L.A.

Steven Dunning’s touching and incisive “Now Chinatown” screens tonight at 7:30 as part of the American Cinematheque’s bimonthly Alternative Screen series at the Egyptian. In the film, the demure, wistful Lee (Lianne X. Hu) has been sent by her parents to Los Angeles to work at a family friend’s modest Chinatown restaurant to help support an ailing grandmother back in China. Lee is at the bottom of a brutal pecking order that leaves her virtually an indentured servant; there’s an extra twist as to why she puts up with so much systematic, wholly unjustified abuse.

Happening upon the restaurant is a young American (Dunning), appalled at what he witnesses and determined to help Lee even though he might well make her plight worse. Lee is a portrait of dignity under extreme pressure--and of growing resolve. For a modest film, “Now Chinatown” looks great, with Chinatown coming across as dramatically atmospheric and exotic. At the Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.

Information: (323) 466-FILM.

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The UCLA Documentary Salon presents films from Russia and other former Soviet republics Friday through Sunday at the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall. Marina Goldovskaya, distinguished Russian documentarian and UCLA professor of film and television, launches the series Friday at 7 p.m. with Vitaly Mansky’s captivating “Private Chronicles: Monologue” (1999). According to Goldovskaya, Mansky went on TV to solicit home movies from which he has fashioned an extraordinary film, creating a fictional man whom he takes from childhood to his mid-30s but is never seen on camera after childhood passes, leaving us with the impression that the boy--in reality boys--seen in home movies grows up to be a documentarian of sorts; in any event, the assemblage has a persuasively subjective point of view.

We discover that for an individual born in the ‘50s, childhood was regarded as the only time a Soviet citizen could expect to experience freedom, so families tried hard to ensure that it would be a happy period. Mansky’s hero--alter ego, perhaps--is born of intellectuals and is to become something of an academic himself.

We see the Soviet system closing in on the youth and his friends; the carefree joys of childhood give way to interminable drinking bouts of adulthood. “Private Chronicles” has the warmth of a bear hug, an overflowing of Russian soul, humor and passion to burn, but also a pervasive sadness and hopelessness. The film has a wonderful score, with the repetitive quality of a Philip Glass composition, that suggests the relentless, driving passage of time. Goldovskaya will hold a discussion with Mansky and other filmmakers represented in the series. Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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A tantalizing program called “Lost Studios,” the first in a UCLA Film Archive series presenting silents made by long-extinct production companies, unspools tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. Tonight’s program will screen two of the four surviving films among the 70-plus produced by the Star Film Ranch of San Antonio, Texas, a branch of a Paris company and run by Gaston Melies, brother of film pioneer Georges Melies. Also screening are three of the five surviving “Snakeville Comedies,” a series of more than 100 shorts made at Chicago-based Essanay Studios’ facility in Niles, Calif.

Film historians Frank Thompson and Sam Gill will introduce the films. Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ current edition of its “Documentary Days” series is shaping up to be one of its strongest as it screens Zuzana Justman’s straightforward, informative and chilling “A Trial in Prague,” which brings clarity to a complex and tragic event in Czech history, a notorious 1952 show trial in which 14 leading members of the Communist Party were wrongly convicted of high treason and espionage; 11 met death by hanging, and 11 were Jewish, though one of the survivors was a Jew, Eduard Goldstucker, who became the first Czech ambassador to Israel.

Goldstucker, several widows of the victims, and their sons--one of whom is the country’s current minister of foreign affairs, Jan Kavan--all speak of the idealism and dedication of the men. Their remarks are interspersed with pertinent archival footage.

It would seem that most of these prominent figures of high repute had three things in common: They had spent time in Western Europe, had fought in the Spanish Civil War and were Jewish. They were worldly intellectuals at a time when the new state of Israel came increasingly under the influence of the U.S., causing the Russians to throw support to its Arab neighbors--and at a time when Stalin, in a rerun of the infamous Moscow show trials of 1936-38, intended to make Soviet domination of Eastern Europe absolute.

He swiftly exported the paranoia and fear endemic in the USSR, exploited anti-Semitism, with the result that was that these 14 men were subjected to prolonged mental and physical torture until at last they were brainwashed and browbeaten into signing confessions that had already been written out for them.

They were exonerated in 1956, too late to do any good for all but Goldstucker, Artur London and Paul Kavan, who died shortly after his release from incarceration. The ordeal of London, who died in 1986, was the basis fo Costa-Gavras’ “The Confession.” Only Goldstucker survives today.

“A Trial in Prague” screens Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. (323) 848-3500, and on Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica.

Information: (310) 394-9741.