They’re only short on time

The eighth annual Resfest Digital Film Festival continues at the Egyptian Theatre through Sunday with a lively presentation of animated and live-action shorts and music videos.

A selection of work available for preview yields some exciting and dynamic work. Mark Craste’s “Jo Jo in the Stars” and John Paul Harvey’s “Brand Spanking” are dazzling examples of imaginative animation. The first evokes a sinister alternative world in which a race of diminutive robots is drawn to the cathedral-like arena of the tyrannical Madame Pica’s circus, where one of the robot creatures, Jo Jo, falls in love with a winged trapeze artist. The consequences are filled with lyricism and pathos. The second imagines a school in which corporate sponsorship is carried to its chillingly logical -- and bleakly humorous -- extreme, with only one pupil resisting the inevitable brainwashing.

Simon Robson’s “What Barry Says” offers a flourish of slogans and statements that attack the People for a New America organization as nothing less than a fascist movement engaged in “war corporatism.” In a different but equally disturbing vein, the French collective Pleix’s animated, darkly satirical “Cish Cash” -- a music video for the song of that name by Basement Jaxx -- envisions a pretty uniformed baton twirler leading Busby Berkeley-like configurations of tanks, planes and finally a rocket launcher, in short a display of military might segueing effortlessly into an actual attack.

Phil Trail’s “Dangle” is an amusing live-action vignette in which a young man discovers a thick pull cord dangling from the sky; to his delight he discovers when he pulls it that he can turn off the sun as easily as a light bulb. But what if he keeps pulling on it insistently as a child might pull on a light socket pull chain?

Mexican cinema

An impressive Saturday double bill -- Jorge Fons’ “Midaq Alley” (1994) and Paul Leduc’s “Frida” (1984) -- is the weekend highlight of the UCLA Film Archive’s ongoing Selections From Mexican Cinema (1917-2003).

“Midaq Alley” (“El callejon de los milagros”) is an old-fashioned, full-blown and highly entertaining melodrama directed by Fons from Vincent Lenero’s adaptation of a 1940s novel by Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz. Set in a picturesque narrow street in Mexico City, it has as its key setting a faded, spacious old apartment house built around a courtyard. It is composed of three episodes centering on three apartment residents: a middle-aged bar owner (Ernesto Gomez Cruz) who openly pursues a young gay man with cataclysmic results; a beautiful young woman (Salma Hayek) who, when her suitor takes off temporarily to the U.S., falls under the spell of a vicious pimp; and the apartment’s spinster landlady (Margarita Sanz), desperate for romance. The film is enjoyably florid, exuding a nostalgic sense of community, and it would have been more convincing had it been set in the ‘40s instead of the present.

Ranked No. 50 of the 100 best Mexican films of all time in a poll of 25 critics and scholars, “Frida” captures the spirit of Frida Kahlo better than the recent film biography of the same name. A foreword explains that the film is an imagining of the memories flooding Kahlo (a magnificent Ofelia Medina) on her deathbed. Although there is a sense of progression in the unfolding of Kahlo’s rich life, the film does move back and forth in time. This “Frida” is a film of memories that float in a dream-like fashion expressed in Leduc’s incessant flow of evocative memories.

The Frida Kahlo of “Frida” embodies the mythical woman while making her human. She is the heroic painter who transformed the pain of her various injuries and illnesses into Surreal art. She is the impassioned participant in sex and politics. She is the wife who was caught up in a tempestuous but profoundly loving marriage to Diego Rivera (Juan Jose Gurrola). There is a certain irony: The couple lived in picturesque luxury with an apparently untrammeled freedom possible only in a democracy, no matter how imperfect, while extolling a fervent communism. (The film does suggest Rivera, more than Kahlo, expressing ultimate disenchantment with Stalin.)

Nelson Echevarria’s “Cabeza de Vaca” (1990), which screens Sunday after Leduc’s “Reed: Insurgent Mexico” (1970) and is a bold, stunning feat of the imagination inspired by the writings of the treasurer (Juan Diego) of an ill-fated 1528 Spanish voyage of exploration who becomes one of a handful of survivors shipwrecked off the Florida coast and who becomes enslaved by the enigmatic shaman (Cobo) of a tribe of Native Americans.

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Screenings

Resfest

Full schedule: www.resfest.com or (323) 658-8700

* Today through Friday: Screenings at 8 and 10 p.m.

* Saturday: Screenings at 6, 8 and 10 p.m.

* Sunday: Screenings at 1, 3, 5 and 7 p.m.

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Selections From Mexican Cinema (1917-2003)

* “Midaq Alley,” 7 p.m. Saturday, followed by “Frida”

* “Reed: Insurgent Mexico,” 7 p.m. Sunday, followed by “Cabeza de Vaca”

Where: James Bridges Theatre, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

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