An Opening Dazzler

The eighth annual Pan African Film & Art Festival opens tonight at 8 at the Magic Johnson Theaters with dual premieres: Jim Jarmusch’s “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,” a cross-cultural gangster picture starring Forest Whitaker, and Carlos Diegues’ “Orfeu,” a contemporary retelling of the same Greek legend that inspired the classic “Black Orpheus” of 40 years ago. Also opening today is the Pan African Fine Arts & Crafts Show, featuring the work of more than 100 artists and craftspeople at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza adjacent to the Magic Johnson Theaters. CCH Pounder is this year’s celebrity host.

As always, the far-ranging film festival presents more films and special programs than any one person could hope to attend, and among them a number of outstanding works. “Ghost Dog” was unavailable for preview, but Diegues’ “Orfeu” proved a dazzler. The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice has been reworked by everyone from Jean Cocteau to Tennessee Williams, and there’s no reason why Diegues, long one of Brazil’s preeminent filmmakers, shouldn’t offer his interpretation four decades after Marcel Camus made his celebrated version.

Both films are set in Carioca Hill, that vast hillside shantytown overlooking Rio’s skyscrapers. Whereas the first was mainly a folkloric transposition of the Greek legend, lush and exotic, Diegues’ “Orfeu,” while every bit as sensual and picturesque, shows a Carioca Hill menaced by a gang of drug dealers, even as TVs and cell phones proliferate through the dense maze of makeshift buildings.

Based on a play by Vinicius de Moraes, “Orfeu” has as its charismatic star Toni Garrido, who plays a samba composer-performer superstar who could easily move himself and his parents (Zeze Motta and Milton Goncalves) to a safer area but chooses to remain in the neighborhood. He hopes to present a role model, specifically to offer a contrast to his lifelong friend Lucinho (Murilo Benicio), a drug dealer and gang leader. Carnaval looms, and the beautiful Euridice (Patricia Franca), who has just lost her widowed father, arrives to stay awhile with her aunt, only to fall in love with Orfeu and become caught in the growing tension between Orfeu and Lucinho. The Carnaval sequences are ravishing in their glitter and intoxicating in their samba music, and “Orfeu” (which also screens Monday at 8:10 p.m.) emerges as a fresh and inspired merging of romantic tragedy and social consciousness. (“Orfeu” also screens at UCLA Sunday at 7 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall.)

Christian Lara’s illuminating “Bitter Sugar” (Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. and Feb. 17 at 10:20 p.m.) imagines a “Court of History,” involving people from the past as well as the present putting on trial Ignace (Jean-Michel Marial), liberator of Guadeloupe. Lara makes clear the equation of colonialism and slavery as the French free the blacks of Gaudeloupe when they need them to fight the British only to re-enslave them under Napoleon, sparking Ignace’s bloody revolution.

Christopher E. Brown dedicates his quietly harrowing “Metal” (Sunday at 6:15 p.m.) to Charles Burnett, and rightly so, for Brown tells essentially the same story as Burnett in his landmark “Killer of Sheep,” that of a hard-working, decent man fighting overwhelming odds to support his family. Yet “Metal” is distinctive in its own right, a more stylized film than Burnett’s, one that proceeds in brief, acutely observed vignettes separated by blackouts, with the film’s beginning and ending accompanied by somber selections from Bach performed by bassist Kathleen Mertz.

Wedrell James plays an unemployed Hunter’s Point, San Francisco, auto mechanic, a proud husband and father as desperate to hold his feelings within himself as he is to find a job; when not looking for work he struggles mightily to get his battered Chevy truck working. Eventually his strong, supportive wife (Vinieta Porter) feels she must tell him, “There are some things you can’t fix.”

Brown and his actors are masterful in subtlety, conveying the psychological impact of the mechanic’s plight upon himself and his family, and without any nudging, that Chevy emerges as a symptom of a cruel breakdown in a racist society. “Metal” is a major work made on a minuscule budget.

Moussa Toure’s lively “T.G.V.” (Wednesday at 6:10 p.m.; Feb. 20 at 7 p.m.) takes its title from a colorfully decorated bus whose driver-owner (Makena Diop) promises that if it were to go any faster it would explode. “T.G.V.” takes place on an adventure-filled ride from Dakar, Senegal, to Conakray, Guinea, and among many other incidents, gets caught up in a tribal uprising over a sacred totem being swiped and ending up in a museum. Aboard the bus are a woman fleeing polygamy; a man fleeing the cops; another man off to take a fifth wife; and a European ethnologist (French star Bernard Giraudeau, who co-produced) and his assistant, who are retracing the path of a 14th century Senegalese explorer but are obtuse about the present. Toure strikes a deft balance between humor and seriousness, and combines it with Wasis Diop’s infectious, jaunty score.

Fernando Vendrell’s “Dribbling Fate” (Wednesday at 8:15 p.m.) is a wry, well-wrought account of a formidably talented soccer player from the picturesque town of Mindelo, Cape Verde, who missed his chance to go to Portugal with its promise of lucrative sports stardom. Now 50, he is stuck running a barely profitable neighborhood bar, where he lives in the past to escape a drab present. When a team from Cape Verde lands a chance to play in Lisbon’s big stadium, Carlo Germano’s Mane dips into savings and takes off for the big game but ends up learning lots more about life and himself than he anticipated. Germano has a wonderfully strong, solid presence that anchors this wise, contemplative film.

Festival information: (323) 896-8221; ticket information: (323) 290-5900.

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The American Cinematheque’s “Alternative Screen” series presents at 7:30 tonight at the Lloyd E. Rigler Theater at the Egyptian (6712 Hollywood Blvd.) Keith Broder’s “Sex, Death and Eyeliner,” a comprehensive, bemused introduction to the Goth lifestyle, embracing young people who take their fashion tips from Vampira and Dracula, go to clubs featuring gloom-and-doom music and clearly have lots of fun doing it. But Broder moves beyond them to people who take vampirism seriously, indulge in bloodletting and mix in domination games and sadomasochistic practices; you may learn more than you really wanted to know. Also screening is Nico B.’s “Pig,” a nightmarish dramatic vignette depicting a sadomasochistic ritual murder that plays like a sequence in a Dennis Cooper novel. “Amazing Visions,” a program of shorts, screens Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Egyptian. (323) 466-FILM.

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Fridrik Thor Fridriksson follows his whimsical 1995 “Cold Fever” with the stunning but much darker, much tougher “Devil’s Island,” which screens Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd.) as part of the Laemmle Theater’s “World Cinema 2000” series. An epic saga, written by Einar Karason and set in the ‘50s, of two brothers, Baddi (Baltasar Kormakur) and Danni (Sveinn Geirsson), living in a Quonset hut with their grandparents in Camp Thule, an abandoned U.S. military base outside Reykjavik, it charts the impact of American pop culture--Elvis in particular--on remote Iceland--inciting dreams of fun and freedom at cruel odds with the dour reality of life in a shantytown whose residents are treated worse than Dust Bowl migrants to California. The result is a spiky, hearty tragicomedy, brilliantly sustained. “Devil’s Island” will screen Feb. 19 and 20 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica). Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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The UCLA Film Archives’ “Contemporary Latin American Films” continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with Argentine filmmaker Pablo Trapero’s captivating “Crane World,” an affectionate portrait of middle-age Argentine construction worker Rulo, wonderfully well played by Luis Margani. When we meet Rulo he’s being unjustly fired and he is propelled into a hand-to-mouth existence, under dismal working conditions; gradually, he emerges as the eternal, universal laborer, who ultimately can depend only on himself and whatever skills he can acquire yet is buoyed by a touching camaraderie between fellow workers.

Rulo is no mere abstraction or symbol, however. He’s a 49-year-old man who once had a brush with celebrity as the member of a band that had caught the public’s fleeting fancy. In his lack of self-pity and his willingness to take responsibility for himself, and in his capacity for warmth and affection, Rulo is terrifically likable and you worry about what will happen to him. Trapero presents him as a perfectly ordinary guy--and then reveals he’s truly heroic in his steadfast ability to take life as it comes. “Crane World” will be followed by “Orfeu” (see Page 15). (310) 206-FILM.