Family secrets unravel in ‘El Misterio’

The American Cinematheque’s third annual Contemporary Mexican Film Series, which will present seven features and 10 shorts today through Sunday at the Egyptian, opens tonight with Jose Luis Garcia Agraz’s “El Misterio del Trinidad” (The Mystery of Trinidad), an original and richly satisfying family drama.

Eduardo Palomo stars as a Mexico City emergency-ward physician whose life is upended with the death of his father, a construction tycoon who drowned while diving as part of his 30-year search for the wreckage of an ancient Spanish galleon off Veracruz.

That the physician was an illegitimate son whose very existence has been unknown to his father’s legitimate daughter and son is the beginning of an unraveling of a string of family secrets that enables Garcia Agraz to consider how much we actually know about our relatives and in turn ourselves; the physician in fact has become just as negligent a father to his 10-year-old daughter as his own father was to him.

“El Misterio” has plenty of emotion, lots of revelations and even adventure but never lapses into soap opera. It is as distinctive and impressive as Garcia Agraz’s heady, intoxicating “Salon Mexico,” about a mid-’30s crime of passion told from conflicting points of view, “Rashomon”-style.

Genocide witness

Among offerings in the ARPA International Film Festival at the Arclight from Oct. 7-12, which commences with a three-day Atom Egoyan retrospective, is Carlo Massa’s revealing and eloquent documentary “Destination Nowhere -- The Witness,” which focuses on Armin Wegner (1886-1978), who as a German army health officer during the Mesopotamian campaign became an eyewitness to the genocide and deportation of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks from 1915-22.

An intellectual and poet, Wegner wrote voluminously of the atrocities to which the Armenians were subjected and took thousands of photographs as well. Wegner, who attempted to rally President Woodrow Wilson to the Armenian cause, believed that had the Turks been punished there would have been no Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews. Massa begins with Wegner’s son delivering his father’s ashes for ceremonial burial in Armenia and then retraces the path of the Armenians’ terrible forced trek through the desert.

Reviewing film buffs

The Laemmle Theatres’ Documentary Days 2003 series opens with Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak’s “Cinemania,” an affectionate yet probing look at six hard-core New York film buffs, which strikes both fear and envy in a professional film critic: fear, that without having the discipline of having to write about what one sees one’s life might be overtaken by movies even more completely than it already is, and envy that these buffs can always choose what they see. What critic wouldn’t prefer to catch a rarely seen classic that happens to screen at the same time as the latest kiddie flick one has been assigned to review?

The great thing about these five men and one woman is that they are largely self-aware and accept that most people would say that they are substituting film for real life. “Why should reality be privileged?” asks Jack Angstreich, who also argues that “neurosis can be a vehicle for discovery.” He has also discovered that cinema provides a “frame” for experience that real life does not.

Angstreich and his friends tend to be eccentric loners and to live in messy quarters crammed with film-related materials. Not surprisingly, they feel current Hollywood releases pale beside the classics and most have a passion for foreign cinema. It would be fun to talk about movies with any of them, especially Angstreich.

French cinema

On Set with French Cinema, a series of three evenings with renowned filmmakers and their films, commences Wednesday at the American Cinematheque with Regis Wargnier’s “I’m the King of the Castle” (1989), which will be followed by a Q&A; with Wargnier, director of the Oscar-winning “Indochine” (1992) and the internationally acclaimed “East-West” (1999). Sadly, “Castle,” a venturesome and unpredictable fable, was never released in the U.S.

Set in an ancient castle somewhere on the coast of France, it stars Jean Rochefort as its rich, aristocratic owner, a recent widow with a small son (Regis Arpin) who hires a nanny (Dominique Blanc), whose husband is a prisoner of war in French-Indochina. She arrives with her own son (David Behar), whose presence is immediately and destructively resented by Arpin.

This exquisite, subtle film, intimate in contrast to two sweeping epics for which Wargnier is best known, unfolds like a dark fairy tale that reveals how oblivious adults can be to the plight of children.

On Oct. 15, Patrice Leconte, who directed the recent “The Man on the Train,” will appear with two of his most acclaimed films, “Monsieur Hire” (1989) and “The Hairdresser’s Husband” (1992).

Then on Nov. 19 Agnes Varda will appear with “Jacquot de Nantes” (1991), her memorable dramatization of the formative years of her late husband, director Jacques Demy.

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Screenings

Contemporary Mexican Film Series

‘El Misterio del Trinidad’

8 tonight, American Cinemateque Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. The series which features seven films and 10 shorts runs through Sunday.

(323) 466-FILM.

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2003 ARPA International Film Festival

‘Destination Nowhere

-- The Witness’

Oct. 12, 12:15 p.m. ArcLight Cinemas, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. The series begins Tuesday and runs through Oct. 12. (323) 464-4226.

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On Set with French Cinema

‘I’m the King of the Castle’

8 p.m. Wednesday, American Cinemateque.

‘Monsieur Hire’ and ‘The Hairdresser’s Husband’

7:30 p.m Oct. 15, American Cinemateque.

‘Jacquot de Nantes’

Nov. 19, American Cinemateque.

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Laemmle Theaters’ Documentary Days 2003 series

‘Cinemania’

Weekends, 11 a.m., at the following theaters: Fairfax Cinemas, Saturday and Sunday, (323) 655-4010, Monica 4-Plex, Oct. 11-12, (310) 394-9741; Playhouse 7, Pasadena, Oct. 18-19, (626) 844-6500; and the Fallbrook 7, West Hills, (818) 340-8710.