Stories of refugees, and best friends

DAVIN Anders Hutchins’ unsparing “The Art of Flight,” which screens at the AFI Fest tonight and Friday at the ArcLight, is above all an act of redemption on the part of Hutchins. The filmmaker spent more than a year in Cairo as a freelance journalist attempting to report on the terrible plight of Sudanese refugees in Egypt only to be met by futility at most every turn.

Hutchins discovered that the refugees were trapped between the Egyptians and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, with its well-paid but often inefficient and indifferent bureaucrats. Few American editors had any interest in his articles, and when a piece was accepted by Egypt Today, he didn’t dare include his reports on torture and deportations of the refugees. All this and more is in this harrowing and introspective guerrilla documentary, relieved by a score featuring an enticing array of Sudanese music.

Two years ago, Bolivia’s Rodrigo Belott’s corrosive, erotic “Sexual Dependency” was perhaps the strongest film at the AFI Fest. Now Belott’s producers have returned with a smaller-scale but also engaging work, Martin Boulocq’s sardonically titled “The Most Beautiful of My Very Best Years.” A skittish, intensely personal mood piece, it focuses on the shy Berto (Juan Pablo Milan), who with the help of his more assured best friend, Victor (Roberto Guilhon), is trying to get his grandfather’s ’65 Volkswagen fixed up and sold so that he can afford to escape the small city of Cochabamba. There’s a deceptive aimlessness to the film, which gains focus as Victor’s attractive and independent girlfriend, Camila (Alejandra Lanza), becomes involved. The film is decidedly minimalist yet evocative and observant.

Lesbian-gay themes

Outfest will present the third edition of Fusion, a festival spotlighting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people of color, which runs Friday through Sunday at various venues and will present 14 programs of films and videos, plus related events. Screening Saturday is “Is It Really So Strange?,” the third work by William E Jones. In his experimental first feature, “Massillon” (1991), he juxtaposed a bleak account of growing up gay in a small Ohio city with lyrical images of the community, with the personal giving way to the political as he delved into how homophobia and the ignorance that goes with it are embedded in our very language. The equally impressive “Finished” (1997) probed the life and death of Alan Lambert, a French Canadian porn star with whom Jones became infatuated but never met. Jones discovered that Lambert committed suicide as part of his half-baked messianic Marxism and because he believed, like Yukio Mishima, having reached the peak of physical perfection, he could only decline.

Jones brings to bear the extraordinary sensitivity and insight of those films to “Is It Really So Strange?,” in which he interviews a range of young Southern California Latinos drawn to the singer Morrissey. Each of the fans emerges as an articulate, reflective individual who responds to the singer for many reasons, primarily perhaps because of his expression of alienation and romantic longing, and because those of diverse sexual orientation can identify with him. (One young woman says simply, “He’s the one who heals all the wounds.”) What especially appeals to Jones about these Morrissey fans is that their various activities in tribute to him have occurred “out of love and spontaneous enthusiasm” and therefore are “expressions of popular culture in its truest and purest sense.”

Malle masterpiece

LACMA launches its “Human, Too Human: The French Films of Louis Malle” with screenings Friday and Saturday of one of the director’s finest, “Lacombe Lucien” (1974). It is an exquisitely realized masterpiece in which a stolid farm youth’s coming of age in the final days of World War II becomes a contemplation of the tragic ironies of fate, the absurdity of evil and the transforming power of love.

In his mid-teens, Lucien (Pierre Blaise) is fed up with his dreary job as a janitor in a nursing home but finds he is unwelcome at his family farm. He tries to join the Resistance but is rejected because of his youth. Fate brings him to a hotel, now the local Gestapo headquarters, where at last he is made to feel at home.

The indoctrination of this impressionable, uneducated youth progresses rapidly. The twinge of guilt he feels at vengefully informing upon the schoolteacher who wouldn’t let him join the Resistance is fleeting, forgotten in the thrill of becoming a policeman, an all-out bully intoxicated by being given virtual life-and-death power over others. Yet an encounter with a Jewish family, living in precarious provincial exile, plunges him into a dizzying moral confusion.

What gives this film, in every way a major work, an overwhelming pathos is its depiction of a dogged, even mulish young man’s awakening to the concept of good and evil. It’s as if one could see the light beginning to penetrate Lucien’s thick head.

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Note: The UCLA Film & Television Archive’s major Mikio Naruse retrospective continues with screenings Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday evenings at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater. (310) 206-FILM, www.cinema.ucla.edu.

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Screenings

AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival

* “The Art of Flight”: 10 tonight, 1 p.m. Friday

* “The Most Beautiful of My Very Best Years”: 9:30 p.m. Friday, 12:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: ArcLight Cinemas, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood.

Info: (866) AFI-FEST, www.afi.com

Fusion

“Is It Really So Strange?”: 9:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: Barnsdall Art Park, 4800 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (213) 480-7088

Human, Too Human: The French Films of Louis Malle

“Lacombe, Lucien”: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday

Where: LACMA BingTheater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 857-6010