Prelude to an epic romance

One of the highlights of the sixth annual Polish Film Festival Los Angeles, which opens tonight at the Directors Guild and runs through next Thursday at the Sunset 5, will be Jerzy Antczak’s long-awaited “Chopin -- Desire for Love.” The festival will present it Sunday in its excellent English-language version.

Antczak is a master at the sweeping period romantic epic, and for this film his actress/co-writer wife, Jadwiga Baranska, serves not only as his associate director but also plays Chopin’s mother. The film concentrates on Chopin’s flight to Paris in 1831 at age 21 in the wake of Poland’s failed uprising against its Russian rulers.

After a two-year struggle, Chopin (Piotr Adamczyk) gains acceptance as a composer and meets his muse and patron. George Sand (Danuta Stenka), the scandalous novelist who was six years Chopin’s senior, had a fondness for cigars and occasionally dressed as a man. What ensues is a persuasive portrait of an artistic household so tempestuous as to be draining to witness. That makes “Chopin” a demanding but ultimately rewarding experience.

At the lavish country estate of Sand, the petulant, consumptive Chopin composes away while Sand’s epileptic, would-be painter son Maurice (Adam Woronowicz) resents every second of his eight-year presence. His younger sister Solange (Bozena Stachura) grows up determined to replace her mother as Chopin’s lover.

The dominant figure by far is Sand, and Stenka shows us a sensual, resolute rebel who deludes her son as she inspires her lover -- and neglects her daughter -- while deeply loving all three.

Stenka is a strong, versatile actress, and in Ryszard Zatorksi’s “Never in My Life” she reveals a comedic flair as a 39-year-old magazine advice columnist whose husband leaves her for a younger woman and who must now forge a new life for herself. The film, to be shown Sunday, is jaunty but so formulaic it could just as easily have been made in Hollywood with Sandra Bullock.

On Wednesday, Pioter Szulkin’s “Ubu the King” is a lively, stylized reworking of Alfred Jarry’s classic, once-scandalous play. This “Ubu” is set in a vast, derelict industrial building populated mainly by skid row types. Egged on by his voluptuous wife (Katarzyna Figura), a poor soul named Ubu (Jan Peszek) decides to lead a people’s revolution against a despotic monarchy in the name of democracy. But once he succeeds, he becomes an inept tyrant.

With its turbulent political history Poland is an apt country to produce “Ubu,” which resonates with mordant gallows humor, spiked by lines from Shakespeare, Communist cant and contemporary references. This “Ubu,” however, is for the cognoscenti who will appreciate a vigorous and imaginative staging of a landmark play for its own sake.

Among the films screening in a program of shorts Wednesday is Hanna Polak and Andrzej Celinski’s up close and personal “The Children of Leningradsky,” which focuses on about a dozen of the homeless youngsters who survive by begging in and around Moscow’s famously ornate railroad station.

As young as 8, they are either unwanted or abused, and for all their youthful spirits, they are caught up in a grim existence and know it. There are some efforts to minister to them, but as one boy observes matter-of-factly, “Of course, there aren’t too many good people left.”

Chaney gem

As melodrama, “Shadows” (1922), which screens Monday at the Silent Movie, is hokey and dated yet is still compelling thanks to Lon Chaney’s portrayal of a Chinese ship’s cook who is washed ashore in a pious fishing community that automatically regards him as a heathen -- never mind that he is a devout Buddhist.

Becoming a well-liked member of the community as a laundryman, Chaney’s Yen Sin ultimately becomes the savior of the local minister (Harrison Ford, no relation to the contemporary star) who’s always trying to “save” him. Directed by Tom Forman, “Shadows” is timeless in its depiction of casual racism and religious hypocrisy.

Gay landmark

A newly restored version of Richard Oswald’s elegant and sensitive “Different From the Others” (1919), which the late gay activist and film historian Vito Russo declared to be the first film to advocate gay rights, screens as an Outfest Wednesdays program at the Egyptian with a prerecorded score prepared exclusively for this screening.

With his usual intensity, Conrad Veidt plays a famed concert violinist who courageously stands up to a blackmailer at a great cost. This enlightened film stirred a considerable controversy and was subsequently banned by the Nazis.

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Screenings

Polish Film Festival

* “Chopin -- Desire for Love”:

9 p.m. Sunday

* “Never in My Life”: 7 p.m. Sunday

* “Ubu the King”: 9 p.m. Wednesday

* “The Children of Leningradsky”: 7 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood

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

Silent Movie Mondays

* “Shadows”: 8 p.m. Monday

Where: Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A.

Info: (323) 655-2520

Outfest Wednesdays

* “Different From the Others”: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM