With Heart and Seoul

The USC School of Cinema-Television and Korean Studies Institute’s outstanding “Shadows of the Modern: Social Change and the New Korean Cinema” continues with Hong Sang Su’s challenging “The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well” (1997). An experiment in subtle back-and-forth shifts in time and perspective, it evokes the everyday life of four people living in Seoul. So rigorous is Hong’s approach that the banality of their existence becomes wearying, yet all the while the filmmaker has been laying the foundation for an increasingly tense and involving experience. Hong first concentrates on a struggling writer (Kim Yui Seong), then on the married woman (Lee Eug Kyeong) with whom he has an affair.

Widening and deepening his perspective, Hong reveals not only how this affair affects the lovers, but also its impact on a pretty box office cashier (Cho Eun Suk) who has fallen hard for the writer without comprehending that he returns her passion, and on the cuckolded husband (Dong Woo). Yet another man enters the picture, providing the film with an unexpected and jolting epilogue. This is a tough-minded work of universal implications brought to life by a cast that excels in demanding roles. “Day” screens at 7 p.m. Friday in Room 108, George Lucas Building.

Jang Sun Woo’s beguiling 1990 “Lovers in Woomukbaemi” (Saturday at 7 p.m. in Norris Theatre) stars Park Jung Hun, the South Korean cinema’s leading young actor. Park plays a good-looking, hearty garment worker who lands a supervisor’s job at a small sewing clothing factory in Woomukbaemi, a ramshackle but friendly community on the outskirts of Seoul. He and his lover (Yoo Hye Ri), a former bar hostess, have an infant son and aren’t getting along.

Park’s Bae Il Do is drawn to a shy, wistful co-worker (Choi Myung Kil) who has an infant son herself and lives in fear of her brutal but fortunately frequently absent husband. Gradually, she gathers the courage to plunge headlong into a passionate, all-consuming affair with Bae. At just the right moment Jang deftly shifts the emphasis to Bae’s neglected lover, a tough and ferocious soul who is not about to lose her lover to another woman. The result is a highly accessible film that is shot through with pain as well as raucous humor.

Beautiful and bleak, Park Kwang Su’s 1995 “A Single Spark” (Sunday at 1 p.m. in the Norris Theatre) is an account of a law school graduate (Moon Sung Keun) researching a book on a brave youth, Jeon Tae Il (Hong Kyo^ng In), who, from 1965 to his death by self-immolation in 1970, agitated for better working conditions for Seoul’s virtually enslaved garment workers. Because the writer, already known as an anti-government activist, is beginning his work in 1975, just as President Park Chung Hee has established a military dictatorship, he and his factory-worker girlfriend are in constant danger. “A Single Spark” is grueling but also impassioned and greatly accomplished. Park’s 1990 “Black Republic” (Sunday at 6 p.m. in the Norris Theatre) deals with political oppression in South Korea in the ‘80s. Park will participate in an academic conference on Saturday. Information: (213) 740-2993.

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Ossama Fawzi’s 1998 “The Paradise of Fallen Angels,” which screens Saturday at 8:30 p.m. at the Magic Johnson Theaters as part of the Pan African Film Festival, is a stylish and darkly droll reworking of a short story by Brazilian writer Jorge Amado. Set in Cairo, it tells of the adventures set in motion by the death of a prosperous businessman (Mahmoud Hamida) who a decade earlier had dropped out to live a life in the streets dedicated to drinking and gambling. His daughter has determined that he should have a discreet and respectable funeral; his pals have other ideas. The result is a “wandering corpse” comedy that reveals that chasm that separates the middle class and those on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Information: (323) 295-1952.

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From Los Angeles’ 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder case, which involved a gang killing, and the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, in which Chicano youths clashed with sailors, Luis Valdez fashioned a play, “Zoot Suit,” which he called his “construct of fact and fantasy.” Although Valdez’s filming of his production was not as exciting as it was on stage, it remains a passionate expression of the Chicano experience and a bitter indictment of Anglo injustice. “Zoot Suit” will have a 20th anniversary screening Friday at 7:30 p.m. at LACMA with Valdez and various cast members present.

Valdez’s finest inspiration is El Pachuco (Edward James Olmos), the ultimate mythical zoot-suiter, the epitome of cool, who serves as narrator and as the conscience of his hero, Henry Reyna (Daniel Valdez), the handsome, likable leader of the 38th Street Gang. On the eve of his entrance into the Navy, Henry drives out to Sleepy Lagoon with his demure girlfriend Della Diaz (Rose Portillo) and is inadvertently caught up in the fracas that leaves her dead.

“Zoot Suit” is at once an exuberant period musical and seething courtroom drama in which the ugliest prejudice is laid bare, with Henry and his equally innocent friends characterized as bloodthirsty descendants of the Aztecs. The young men’s dedicated civil libertarian attorney (Charles Aidman) repeatedly cites their nakedly biased judge (John Anderson) for misconduct. Spearheading a defense committee for Henry and his friends is a dynamic, union activist (Tyne Daly).

Valdez captured well many of the elements of the era that contributed to the fate of the Sleepy Lagoon defendants--the sensationalist press, the feverish patriotism of wartime and the rampant bigotry directed at all minorities.

At the same time, Valdez questions the validity of the switch-bladed, cynical pachuco mystique as Henry comes to realize that El Pachuco is at once his best friend--and worst enemy. Information: (323) 857-6010.

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Screening Sunday at 7 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater as part of the UCLA Film Archives’ “Back in the USSR: Soviet Film of the 1960s” is Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Roublev” (1967), a stunning one-of-a-kind masterpiece, an epic of impassioned grandeur and astonishing, almost hallucinatory imagery that traces the spiritual odyssey of an artist-monk of whom little is known except for what remains of his work, most notably his contributions to the frescoes in Moscow’s Cathedral of Annunciation.

Tarkovsky takes us on a kind of “Pilgrim’s Progress” as Roublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn), chosen to be an apprentice to Theophanes the Greek (Nikokai Sergeev), leaves his monastery in 1400 to begin his life as an itinerant painter. It is an era of Russian civil wars and tartar invasions.

In the course of his journeys Roublev encounters everything from a crucifixion in the snow that unfolds like a Passion play to a heady pagan festival on the Klasma River. This film of description-defying richness and splendor has been photographed (by Vadim Yusov) in exquisitely modulated black-and-white. “Back in the USSR” starts tonight and runs through March 4. Information: (310) 206-FILM.