‘Poligono Sur’ sways to a Gypsy rhythm

Films such as Dominique Abel’s wonderful “Poligono Sur” are helping make the American Cinematheque’s 11th annual Recent Spanish Cinema series the strongest in several years.

“Poligono Sur,” also known as “The Three Thousand,” opens with an arresting shot: a view out a fourth-floor window in the Gypsy housing project -- shared by a donkey. Called the Three Thousand (but home to as many as 40,000 people, many of them displaced from the riverside Triana neighborhood, which was settled 500 years ago), the project is rife with the heavy drug trafficking that has become the curse of Gypsy youths who already have trouble finding jobs. One man laments the loss of traditional values. “We used to settle for a donkey and a pot of potatoes,” he says. “Now everyone wants a Mercedes.”

Such observations emerge in conversations between friends that punctuate terrific flamenco singing and dancing numbers. “Poligono Sur” is a concert film cleverly disguised as a documentary, in which several flamenco artists comb the area for fellow performers to appear in an upcoming open-air concert to benefit the neighborhood. The film climaxes with several numbers at the concert, but hearing and seeing all the other songs and dances performed in people’s homes or outside around a bonfire provides a rich, intimate context.

Achero Manas’ vibrant, impassioned “November” stars Oscar Jaenada as a brooding, tousled-haired young man who comes to Madrid to enroll in acting school and rebels against its traditional dictums to form his own troupe to perform in the streets of the city. Jaenada’s Alfredo, darkly handsome and charismatic, flat-out wants to change the world through street theater. These outrageous mime skits are filmed documentary-style before an unsuspecting public and inevitably end in arrests because the November troupe refuses to get permits for their performances. In time they command serious attention from theater professionals, which sparks conflict within the group.

“November” ends with a truly stunning coup de theatre, but the getting there is sometimes choppy. Manas frequently cuts away from the action to a series of talking heads, actual actors well into middle age, who are presented as former members of November. These actors are actually veterans of the radical ‘70s troupe Piojo Picon, upon which the film is based, and while eloquent these “witnesses” are in fact largely redundant, and the time spent with them could have been better spent developing character and relationships within the November troupe. Even so, “November” is compelling and energetic, helped immensely by a moody, spare jazz score and featuring Tom Waits’ “Tom Traubert’s Blues.”

Enrique Urbizu’s “Life Marks” is a deeply felt study of brotherly love all the more affecting for the filmmaker’s restrained approach. Fito (Juan Sanz), a tousled-haired young truck driver with a radiantly beautiful wife, Juana (Zay Nuba), and a 5-year-old son, is on the verge of losing everything to his compulsive gambling when his older brother Pedro (Jose Coronado) appears after a 13-year absence. Pedro is a handsome, powerful-looking man, well-tailored, reticent and not just a little mysterious. During those 13 years Fito had not heard a word from Pedro, who seems to be decidedly well-off but is offering no more explanation than he has been in London.

In this most graceful film Pedro exudes the romantic aura of a suave movie gangster who lives by his own code of honor, and Coronado has a George Raft presence that allows him to pull it off. As a result, the effect Pedro has on Fito and Juana, and the effect they in turn have on him makes for a most compelling film.

Double whammy

Kutlug Ataman’s highly charged thriller “Lola and Billy the Kid” (1998) explores the shadowy world of Berlin’s gay Turkish emigres, who live lives of double jeopardy from extreme homophobia within their own ethnic culture and from lethal German xenophobes who may also be homophobes. The pivotal figure is 17-year-old Murat (Baki Davrak), who is struggling with his own homosexuality when he at last meets the disowned older gay brother (Gandi Mukli) he never knew he had and who is a popular female impersonator known as Lola. This film is at once a family tragedy and a work of remorseless suspense not without bleak humor.

*

Screenings

American Cinematheque

Recent Spanish Cinema picks

* Friday: “Seville South,”

7 p.m.; “November,” 9:30 p.m.

* Saturday: “Life Marks,”

7:30 p.m.

Where: The Egyptian,

6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM

Goethe Institut

“Young Turks” series pick

* Tuesday: “Lola and Billy the Kid,” 7 p.m.

Where: Goethe Institut Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100

Info: (323) 525-3388