Gems From Asian Pacific Film Festival

Among the multitude of exciting and venturesome films screening during the opening week of the Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival is Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang’s “Vive L’Amour” (UCLA’s Melnitz Theater Saturday at 7:30 p.m.), which is every bit as audacious as his “Rebels of the Neon God,” screened at the festival in 1993.

Tsai again displays his mastery in evoking the despair of aimless urban young people. This austere, elegant yet compelling film follows three people, a beautiful but vulnerable female real estate broker (Yang Kuei-Mei) who picks up men for casual sex in unrented apartments. The men include a cocky, good-looking street vendor (Chen Chao-Jung) and a wistful salesman of burial caskets who develops an unrequited passion for the vendor. By the end of this film, these three have made loneliness overwhelmingly palpable.

Another even more important film in the festival is the ever-fearless Huang Jianxin’s superb, monumental, 147-minute “Back to Back, Face to Face” (Sunday 9 p.m. at Melnitz). After his terse, stunning “The Wooden Man’s Bride,” a folk tale about a woman forced to marry the carved effigy of the dead man to whom she had been betrothed, Huang returns to his unstinting criticism of the calcified mentality of the Communist Party of his ultra-controversial “Black Cannon Incident.”

Ni Uzhen-Hua, in an understated portrayal of sustained power, plays the pudgy, highly effective acting director of the party’s cultural center in Xian, housed in an ancient temple compound.

The entire film turns upon the fact that the higher-ups perennially pass him over for the directorship that he deserves. The film’s great length allows Huang to move far beyond a revelation of party corruption and flagrant politicking to tell a timeless, universal story of a decent man engaged in give-and-take, risks and sheer dogged persistence in the face of injustice and caprice that constitutes the kind of survival with which most of us are only too familiar.

With his marvelous ensemble cast, Huang progresses from an often darkly hilarious satire of the bureaucratic mentality to the larger meaning of his hero’s entire existence.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

New Showcase: NewTown Pasadena, a new experimental film showcase, will present Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Forum of All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., in Pasadena, “Cultural Artifacts,” an engaging program of films composed entirely of found footage that is rich in diversity.

Violence marks the images assembled by Chick Strand in “Loose Ends” (1979) while in “Public Domain” (1972) Hollis Frampton celebrates the charm and innocence of the earliest cinema in a collage of clips culled from the Library of Congress archive.

In “S1” (1985) Christoph Janetzko explores the infinite possibilities in rhythm and composition within the enlarged image of a moving film sprocket hole.

With “Karagoez--Catalog 9.5” (1981), Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi celebrate the sensual and the exotic in a lush, tinted fantasy that will be shown with “scented” accompaniment.

Also screening--but unavailable for preview--is Phil Solomon’s “Secret Garden” (1988), which reprocesses sounds and images from children’s films to evoke a sense of the passage from innocence.

Information: (818) 398-9278.