Distinctive, daunting Polish fare

Drawing from a long and distinguished history, contemporary Polish cinema can be quite venturesome -- as exemplified by Andrzej Jakimowski’s dauntingly minimalist “Squint Your Eyes,” one of the highlights of the fifth annual Polish Film Festival.

The festival, which has a gala opening tonight at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and runs through April 29 at the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, offers 17 features and documentaries and five shorts. On the final day, the festival marks the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw uprising by presenting Andrzej Munk’s 1957 classic, “Eroica.”

In “Squint Your Eyes,” a 10-year-old runaway (Ola Proszynska) seeks refuge from her well-off parents at a deserted farm where her former teacher (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is working as a night watchman. Watching over what? That could serve as the first of many questions raised by a movie in which nothing much happens. Yet the film creates and sustains an ambiguous mood that invites all manner of considerations large and small. The crux of the matter, which emerges through various encounters with passersby, the girl’s parents and a group of the teacher’s party-hearty pals, is how, consciously or otherwise, adults affect children.

Adapted from a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, Jan Jakub Kolski’s “Pornography” offers little that is erotic but much about the obscenity of war. It opens in 1943 with a view of life in Warsaw outside the ghetto, with a group of artists and intellectuals meeting in private apartments rather than in cafes and living a seemingly indolent existence. Two solid-looking middle-aged thinkers, Fryderyk (Krzysztof Majchrzak) and Witold (Adam Ferency), happily accept the invitation of an extended stay at the elegant manor of a friend, Hipolit (Krzysztof Globisz), an oasis of light in a countryside overrun with dangerous Nazi soldiers. The two men amuse themselves by fostering a romance between two young blond household servants, lifelong friends, but it is just a matter of time before the grim realities of war intrude upon this aristocratic establishment. Character and fate will inevitably interplay, and there will also emerge a timeless clash of ideologies with the arrival of Hipolit’s daughter’s future mother-in-law, representing Catholic fundamentalism, with Fryderyk the upholder of atheist beliefs. The result is a provocative, demanding and distinctive film.

Dutch delight

As a postscript to UCLA Film Archive’s “The Human Dutch: Films From the Netherlands,” there will be a sneak preview Wednesday of Albert ter Heerdt’s “Hush Hush Baby!” -- a cross-cultural crowd-pleaser that set records at its 30-theater opening in Holland in January. It’s a lively yet caustic comedy about a Moroccan immigrant family coping with life in a foreign country.

Like many of his countrymen, Ali Bentarik (Salah Eddine Benmoussa) never expected to spend the rest of his life abroad. However, he is too secure in a middle-class existence to consider seriously returning to live in his primitive desert village. Very much the old-country patriarch, he lords over his seemingly dutiful wife (Zohra Flifla Slimani) but meets resistance from his four Europeanized children. The real problem is the 20-year-old middle son, Abdullah (Mimoun Oaissa), the film’s central figure.

Part clown, part oaf, Ab has no idea what he wants to do with his life and falls in with his trouble-prone slacker pals. Ab knocks about from job to job, risks serious trouble and even thinks an arranged marriage with a girl from the ancestral village might be the solution. Ab doesn’t so much struggle with cultural identity as with the delusion that a stable, affluent society like the Netherlands automatically will afford him a fine job and all that goes with it. The film’s amusing final sequence -- a postscript that reveals the fate of Ab and his pals -- sums up perfectly why this broad yet spiky comedy has such universal appeal.

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Screenings

Polish Film Festival selections

* “Squint Your Eyes,” Friday, 9 p.m.

* “Pornography,” Saturday, 9 p.m.

Where: Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica

Info: (818) 982-8827 or www.polishfilmla.org

UCLA Film Archive’s ‘The Human Dutch: Films From the Netherlands’

* “Hush Hush Baby!” Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

Info: (310) 206-FILM or www.cinema.ucla.edu