Two countries, but neither feels like home

AMONG the strongest of themes of a globally conscious cinema is the identity limbo that comes from having ties to two disparate cultures, yet never quite feeling either is home. Duki Dror’s heartbreaking new documentary “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen,” showing Saturday at the Egyptian Theatre as part of the four-day National Geographic All Roads Film Festival, makes this problem poetically vivid for one Vietnamese family who has lived in Israel since the parents fled their politically volatile homeland in the ‘70s and were granted permanent refuge by the Jewish state.

Hoiami Nguyen and his wife eventually reared five daughters in Israel, but Hoiami always thought of permanently returning to his birth country, and Dror documents his long-awaited trip back to Vietnam. Although there is some emotional catharsis, his attempts to reclaim family-owned lands long since given away lead him to a bittersweet lesson in the discrepancies between a dream deferred and the harshness of lost time.

For eldest daughter Vaan, meanwhile, Israeli-born and western-influenced yet soured on her foreigner status in “elitist Jewish society,” the chance to call her dad’s breathtaking jungle village home is so palpable it hurts.

But for her the trip proves just as fraught, leaving her unmoored, restless heart ironically not unlike, as she puts it, “the forced exile so familiar to Jewish people.” Above all, the film touchingly reinforces the reality that for certain victims of history, the only territorial pull with any reliable sense of belonging is toward the bonds of family.

Post-Nazi era

In times of war, laying claim to a nationalistic identity is often an easily worn form of mental armor, but what happens when one is brought face to face with battle’s ugly human costs?

What distinguished German filmmaker Helmut Kautner’s post-Nazi era movies -- after sticking mostly to flighty romances while World War II raged -- were his occasionally piercing forays into the souls of more conscience-stricken wartime Germans. The Goethe Institut’s 12-film series “Hope as Principal” -- paying tribute to the late director -- includes two of his most noteworthy tales of conscience: “The Last Bridge” (“Die Letzte Brucke”) and “The Devil’s General” (“Des Teufels General”).

The former, an International Jury Prize winner at Cannes in 1954, tells the story of Helga (Maria Schell), an apolitical German pediatrician stationed in Yugoslavia who is captured by enemy partisans in need of medical care for their brethren. The experience serves to open her eyes to the moral imperative of her profession, whatever a patient’s nationality, and early in Helga’s captivity, Kautner even has her awaken from the shade of a boulder -- in other words, literally from under a rock. But it’s the actress’ expressive portrayal and a behind-enemy-lines narrative that drive this doctor-without-borders classic.

Next Thursday’s “The Devil’s General,” from 1955, is Kautner’s portrait of a decorated, irreverent Luftwaffe general, played with magnificently cynical gusto by Curt Jurgens, who discovers too late that his barely tolerated outsider-ness -- “I could never eat as much as I want to throw up,” he memorably quips of the Nazi regime -- makes him an all-too-perfect scapegoat when the war effort falters.

Historical specifics aside, the film also serves as a pointed look at the strange culture of selfish advancement, decadence and unquestioning faith that often underpin any malevolently conceived campaign of aggression.

Five-year plan

It’s safe to say the legendarily absurdist Luis Bunuel might have sparked to the sordid, gruesome charms of renowned animator Suzan Pitt’s five-years-in-the-making short “El Doctor,” which is being shown Tuesday at REDCAT as part of a program of her works called “Suzan Pitt’s Surreal Landscapes.” A trippy, magic-realist expedition through the mind of a pickled old Mexican doctor on his regret-filled last day on Earth, “El Doctor” makes rich use of Pitt’s hand-drawn movement technique: Her squirmy human (and nonhuman) forms wiggle in the frame like a bacteria party in a festive petri dish. She also incorporates other dazzling experimental processes, including sand animation and painting directly onto film stock. Overall the effect is playfully grim and somehow wondrous, an ode to the living, breathing fantastic in Mexican folk art.

Starting Oct. 5, REDCAT is also screening four days of cherry-picked gems from the Museum of Modern Art’s recent, extensive retrospective of narrative, experimental, documentary and animation work from CalArts students spanning 35 years, called “Fragments From a Lover’s Discourse.” Of the newer work, one highlight is Cy Kuckenbaker’s slyly humorous and poignant short “The Orphans,” about the journey two elderly Lithuanian men take to Berlin to honor a childhood buddy’s deathbed wish.

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Screenings

All Roads Film Festival

* “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen”: 5 p.m. Saturday

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica

Info: (323) 466-FILM, www.nationalgeographic.com/allroads

Helmut Kautner retrospective

* “The Last Bridge”: 7 p.m. today

* “The Devil’s General”: 7 p.m. next Thursday

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

Info: (323) 525-3388, www.goethe.de/losangeles

REDCAT

* “Suzan Pitt’s Surreal Landscapes”: 8 p.m. Tuesday

* “Fragments From a Lover’s Discourse”: (Oct. 5 to 8)

Where: Disney Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, downtown L.A.

Info: (213) 237-2800, www.redcat.org