Breaking away

Outwrite and Underground

It's a prime weekend to tiptoe away from your regular moviehouse routine and go genuinely subterranean. This Saturday and Sunday (February 27 and 28) a $15 pass gets you into two full days of the Outwrite Film & Video Series, an excellent selection of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered shorts and features showing at the Park Plaza Hotel (for information call 262-6969).

Also, ever-effervescent indie promoter David Kleiler, the "Local Sightings" king, has created the First Boston Underground Film Festival. Kleiler has organized six different collections of films for this Friday and Saturday at the Revolving Museum, 290 A Street, Fort Point Channel (975-3361), and more screenings and recaps when the fest moves to the Boston Film and Video Foundation, at 1126 Boylston Street (536-1540), Sunday afternoon at 4:15. Tickets are $5 per screening, $20 for a see-everything pass. For more information, call 975-3361.

Back to the Outwrite Film & Video Series. Some highlights:

A personal appearance by the renowned British lesbian-feminist filmmaker Pratibha Parmar. Saturday at 2:45 she'll unveil her new The Righteous Babes, a film essay about female recording artists in the 1990s and their influence, good and bad, on young women. Parmar's super-sexy Wavelengths, which conjures up an idyllic cyberdyke romance, plays in a program of shorts at 6 p.m. that evening.

Dakan (Saturday at 8 p.m.), Mohamed Camara's engrossing 1997 feature from Guinea (in French and Malinke with English subtitles), is the first feature film on homosexuality from sub-Saharan Africa. Two young men fall in love and have the courage to proclaim their feelings in a country where homosexuality has no name. This "problem drama" (think African Ibsen), which is totally sympathetic to the gay protagonists, acknowledges the influence their announcement has on their traditional families: crying, anger, denial -- and one of the boy's mothers ends up in a wheelchair.

Treyf ("Unkosher"; Sunday at 11:45 a.m.) is the funky lesbian-Jewish romance of the two filmmakers, Alisa Lebow and Cynthia Madansky. One is a vegetarian; the other, the enlightened one, thrives on Jewish cuisine. One of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema shows the enlightened one putting cole slaw on her beautiful corned beef on rye at Brooklyn's Katz's Deli. Yum, yum, yum!

Treyf is paired with a Boston must-see, the world-premiere screening of Cambridge resident Nish Saran's 41-minute Summer in My Veins, a dandy "coming out" road documentary. Following his Harvard graduation, Saran takes a trip across America with his mother and his two aunts, all arrivals from India, and it's an opportunity for him to admit his gayness. But the words keep sticking in his throat. Meanwhile, he keeps videoing his relatives; and these upper-caste Indian ladies prove 10 times as unleashed as the suddenly uptight filmmaker. They tell dirty jokes, do raunchy dances, and even, with one aunt, manage a Monica L. with a banana.

Saran finally comes out to his mom while she stares incredulously into the lens. But rather than race away, she stays there, feet planted. She allows herself to be filmed while she dashes through several octaves of emotions -- disbelief, distress, anger, understanding, acceptance -- all in one amazing eight-minute nonstop run of the camera. The formidable Mrs. Saran is a great actress with an intuitive sense of drama, a documentary diva who is as powerful in the frame as a Liz Taylor or a Bette Davis.

And the Underground Film Festival . . .

David Kleiler explains: "I'm offering a variety of genuinely underground films, either in form or content, or both, mostly from the region, which don't get shown in a focused way." As I write, the schedule is still being patched together. I'd take a chance with Kleiler, though the few sample tapes he offered me prove inconclusive: a badly ingrown LA indie about the film industry, Slaves of New York; a sick sick sick Chicago slasher movie, The Bride of Frank; a sensitive gothic experimental short, Rossana Jeran's M(Other); and Alla Kovgan's Belongings, a talented local work that slides between student-film awkwardnesses and really exquisite poetic moments of visuals and sound.

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Moving off the weekend, I much recommend the 1982 feature The White Rose, which will be screening March 4 at 7:30 p.m. at Brandeis University's Sachar International Center, with the director, Germany's Michael Verhoeven, in attendance. More than any contemporary German filmmaker, Verhoeven, a non-Jew, has devoted himself to keeping before the amnesiac public the pernicious memories of Nazi history. (His other films include The Nasty Girl, the true story of a German schoolgirl who got in trouble by researching her town's Nazi past, and My Mother's Courage, a recent Holocaust drama.)

The White Rose is the tragic, true-life story of five Munich students and their professor who formed a secret anti-Nazi society in 1942 Munich and were captured and executed by the Gestapo. It's the most stirring feature ever made about non-Jewish resistance to the Nazis. As for Verhoeven, whom I've had the privilege of interviewing several times: he's a mensch.