Asian Pacific Festival to Open With Three Gems

Among the many opening-weekend offerings from the Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival are three outstanding films. Mani Rathnam’s “Bombay” (Friday at LACMA at 9:30 p.m.) and Kwang-Su Park’s “A Single Spark” (Saturday at LACMA at 7 p.m.) offer contrasting yet equally impressive approaches to the protest film, the first as melodramatic as the second is intellectual. At once the most popular and controversial movie in the history of the Indian cinema, “Bombay” is a triumph of populist art, sweepingly cinematic and rousingly impassioned.

In the mid-’80s, a young man (Arvind Swamy) of solidly middle-class Hindu family in a small city in southern India, is about to move to Bombay, where he’s to begin work as a proofreader while pursuing a degree in journalism. He’s transfixed by a glimpse of a ravishingly beautiful Muslim (Manisha Koirala). Since it’s love at first sight, the two do the unthinkable: They take off for Bombay and marry, much to the total outrage of their respective fathers.

The years pass, and the fathers are gradually coming to accept each other when the couple and their families become caught up in the devastating religious riots that swept over Bombay in January 1993, which are restaged for the camera in all their fiery terror. With tremendous bravura, Rathnam makes a boldly effective condemnation of the senseless destruction and tragedy of religious fanaticism.

As beautiful as it is bleak, “A Single Spark” tells of a law school graduate (Sung-Keun Moon) researching a book on a brave youth (Kyuong-In Hong) who, from 1965 to his death by self-immolation in 1970, agitated for better working conditions for Seoul’s virtually enslaved garment workers.

Since the writer, already known as an anti-government activist himself, is beginning his work in 1975, just as President Chung-Hee Park has established a military dictatorship, he and his factory worker girlfriend are in constant danger. “A Single Spark” is grueling but also impassioned and greatly accomplished.

Only an hour long, JT Takagi’s and Hye-Jung Park’s outstanding documentary “The Women Outside” (Sunday at UCLA at 2:30 p.m.) offers an incisive study of the plight of Korean women who either marry or serve as prostitutes for the men of the U.S. military, which has nearly 100 camps and installations throughout South Korea. The film says that while some Korean women have found happiness and respect as American wives, brides and prostitutes alike are by and large caught between American condescension and a rigid Korean patriarchy.

Information from LACMA: (213) 857-6010; UCLA: (310) 206-FILM.

*

Fascinating Journey: The American Cinematheque and the International Documentary Assn. will present George Ungar’s fascinating “The Champagne Safari” (Saturday at 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. at Raleigh Studios), an account of Charles Bedaux, who rose from Montmartre pimp to draconian efficiency expert in the U.S. to Nazi collaborator. He is a key figure because of his knowledge of the full extent of U.S. industrial support of Hitler between the outbreak of World War II until Pearl Harbor.

The dashing Bedaux, loving but unfaithful husband to an American heiress, hosted the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in his Loire chateau and staged their controversial tour of the Third Reich. Serving as the film’s metaphor is Oscar-winning Floyd Crosby’s coverage of Bedaux’s ill-fated, “Fitzcarraldo”-like trek through the Canadian Rockies in 1934.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.

*

Russian Symbolism: The Sunset 5’s “Russian Women Filmmakers” series continues Saturday, Sunday and Monday at 11 a.m. with Svetlana Proskurina’s “Reflection in a Mirror,” a surreal study of a stage actor (Victor Proskurin, the director’s husband) in an identity crisis that has been said to be symbolic of the impact of the breakup of the Soviet Union upon his fortysomething generation.

As beautiful as an Andrei Tarkovsky film--and just as demanding--”Reflection” finds the actor involved with a young woman and a former lover, a tempestuous painter, as well as his own elegant wife; we’re left to make what we will of these involvements and the actor’s predicament.

Information: (213) 848-3500.