Polish festival presenting powerful, provocative films

Among the films screening in the fourth annual Polish Film Festival Los Angeles, which will run tonight through next Thursday, is “Eddie,” Poland’s official entry in the recent Academy Awards. Alternately bleak and sentimental, brutal and tender, “Eddie” is at once poetic in its expressive imagery yet very demanding to sit through. But viewer patience pays off with an unexpectedly powerful and mature ending. It marks a promising debut for director and co-writer Piotr Trzaskalski. The festival opens with a gala reception and a program of films at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in North Hollywood.

Eddie (Henryk Golebiewski) is a gaunt-looking middle-aged man. He and his younger, somewhat slow-witted pal Jurek (Jacek Braciak) eke out a living pulling a large cart through a big city, probably Warsaw, collecting scrap metal and share grim quarters in a derelict warehouse.

That Eddie also collects books as he comes upon them and actually reads them is not unnoticed by two thuggish brothers who run an illegal liquor trade. The brothers have raised their younger sister (Alexsandra Kisio), now 17, with fierce protectiveness and enlist Eddie to tutor her. But she is an unhappy rebel in a desperate predicament. What follows is at times hard to take but is also unpredictable and provocative.

A festival highlight is a major work of animation, Andrzej Czeczot’s “Eden,” an enchanting magical mystery tour through the human psyche with its eternal yearnings of the flesh and the spirit, and its equally eternal capacity for good and evil.

Czeczot takes us on a free-wheeling ride though the highs and lows of Western civilization as we witness his wistful, flute-playing Everyman experience everything from a biblical expulsion from Eden, a Dante-esque time in Purgatory to ultimate salvation; in Czeczot’s telling, Noah’s Ark lands in New York. His images have a rich, folkloric quality and his all-encompassing embrace of human experience, even at its most cruel and foolish, emerges as warm and optimistic. Six years in the making, “Eden,” with Michal Urbaniak’s score as witty and surprising as the film itself, is a triumph for the veteran Czeczot.

The festival concludes Thursday with a screening of Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” which will be followed by Wojciech Wojcik’s powerful and ironic “Back and Forth,” set in Lodz in 1965 and dealing with two men, one a surgeon (Janusz Gajos) and the other a painter (Jan Frycz), who cross paths 20 years after serving in the Polish underground during World War II and being persecuted for it ever since. This tense, suspenseful film is a minefield of unexpected developments, the most surprising of which for those of us unfamiliar with its story is that it’s true. Winner of the festival’s Hollywood Eagle Award, it’s a superior and satisfying film, with impressively understated performances from its stars.

Michel REILHAC’S “The Good Old Naughty Days,” a 69-minute compilation of silent French blue movies, proves to be scarcely erotic by today’s standards but rather a typically Gallic expression of uninhibited joie de vivre. Even so, this is explicit, strictly adult fare, opening Friday at the Fairfax Cinemas.

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Screenings

Polish Film Festival

Los Angeles

“Eden”: Sunday, 9 p.m., Laemmle Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St.,

Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741

“Eddie”: Tuesday, 7 p.m., Laemmle Monica 4-Plex

“The Pianist” & “Back and Forth”: Thursday at 6 and 9 p.m., respectively, Laemmle Monica 4-Plex

French blue movies

“The Good Old Naughty Days”: Laemmle Fairfax Cinemas,

7907 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, (323) 655-4010