This year

Fragments*Jerusalem at Brandeis

Most of us would be apprehensive about committing to Ron Havilio's two-part, six-hour Fragments*Jerusalem, which is the centerpiece of the mini-festival "Jewishfilm.2000 -- From Berlin to Jerusalem," at Brandeis University next weekend. As important and comprehensive as it might be, six hours sounds like more than you'd want to spend contemplating Israel's ancient city. The endless obsessive, exhaustive, didactic hours of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah come to mind. It was good for you, perhaps great for you, but definitely an ordeal.

Well, I'm here to tell you not to worry. I previewed Havilio's film beginning to end, all six hours with just a couple of wee breaks and stretches, and I munched my tuna-fish-sandwich lunch while watching, and all the time I felt at ease. Often exhilarated. Fragments*Jerusalem is an enthralling watch. And what keeps it going is never self-absorption (Havilio is an extremely modest, easygoing presence in his own film) or a need to preach (in voiceover, he's moderate and tempered about the very issues that precipitate endlessly fractious Israeli oratory). No, what anchors this lovely documentary is the director's low-key humanism; what propels it is his intense, infectious curiosity. Fragments*Jerusalem is a vessel for Havilio's passionate study of history, and architecture, and geography, and ethnography, and comparative religion. He chooses a microcosmic approach to 150 years of the city, focusing on an area around the Old City's Jaffa Gate, including the Arab market, Jaffa Road, and the Casbah-like slum streets known as Mamila. What has happened here, from 1896, when Lumière cinematographers came and filmed, through the Arab uprising, the Intifada, and the Israelis' regrettable razing of Mamila.

But Fragments*Jerusalem is also an extended home movie -- there's even time for the story of Havilio's pet bird! Probably four hours of the six enmesh Havilio's family in the chronicle of Jerusalem. Without any formal self-consciousness, the director segues back and forth through time. If he's not with his present family (a functional one!), three daughters and a sound-editor wife, he'll be jumping back to look in on his father's Sephardic family or his mother's Ashkenazi one, both with 19th-century roots in the Holy Land. His mother's relatives actually emigrated from Vilna, Lithuania, in 1810, well in advance of the Jewish Messiah.

The real Messiah (not Jesus!) was supposed to arrive in 1848. Didn't happen. That's one of the many, many, many things I learned along the way in my six hours with Fragments*Jerusalem. What else? Somehow, I never realized that Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. Havilio shows Austrian troops in Jerusalem joining the already-there Turkish ones to fight World War I. Many residing in the Jewish quarter hid out because they were being conscripted to fight alongside the Axis troops.

What else? How about a photo of a swastika flying freely on a German-owned luxury hotel just outside Jerusalem's Walled City. That was in the 1930s, when Palestine was under British rule and England and Germany were not yet at war.

What else? I know now that in 1927 Jerusalem was shattered by an earthquake. And Havilio shows amazing photographs of Jerusalem buried by ice and snow. Several times a century.

What else? I discovered that the Wailing Wall used to be non-gendered and non-sexist. There are film snippets and photographs of Jewish women and men praying there together. It's only in today's Israel, where the religious right has political clout, that the guys have the Wall to themselves. The women are kept to Wailing Watching.

The schedule for Fragments*Jerusalem at the Sachar International Center: April 6: Part 1 at 7 p.m., with the filmmaker present; April 8: Part 2 at 7:30 p.m., with the filmmaker present; April 9: Part 1 at 2 p.m. and Part 2 at 6:30 p.m. And yes, you can see either part separately. Havilio has said that's okay.

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Boston's film and arts community continues to grieve the recent death of Museum School professor and activist documentary filmmaker Richard Broadman. A memorial screening of his 1978 classic of social consciousness, Mission Hill and the Miracle of Boston, will take place on April 9 at 5:45 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts. All proceeds from the screening will go to the Richard Broadman Memorial Fund.

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The Boston Institute for Psychiatry concludes its spring series, "Psychology Goes to the Movies," with an unorthodox choice of screening: Takeshi Kitano's 1998 masterpiece, Hana-Bi ("Fireworks"), wherein a hardboiled Tokyo cop takes off from the force so he can accompany his perhaps terminally ill wife on a final journey. Will the discussion leaders, filmmaker Eileen Finkelstein and psychologist Ronald Goldman, consider my weird theory? Kitano's cop considers killing his wife because he imagines she's dying, but perhaps she's only severely depressed. The March 31 screening is at 7 p.m. at the Evelyn Marran Theater at Lesley College, just north of Harvard Law School.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com