Lorna Lowe Streeter’s Shelter, which screens at the Coolidge Corner this Monday, April 14, is a intense, courageous video that demonstrates why Boston is an international epicenter of the personal documentary. Streeter, an African-American woman in her early 30s, is still, as she testifies in candid self-interviews, in a tizzy because of her off-key relationship with her mother. Actually, two moms: Fran, who raised Lorna after bringing her home in infancy, and Michelle, the woman who gave up her baby for adoption, and whom Lorna tracked down in 1993. In her absorbing investigation, Streeter puts both before her camera, and both prove wanting as maternal figures. Fran is suspicious, spooky, and emotionally frigid; Michelle is a shifty, sobbing, unreliable drama queen. Although both her moms have their own family demons, Streeter is right to lament that she’s never had " a mother being in love with her daughter. "

REMEMBER THE CHURCH WEDDING and dance in the pre-Vietnam section of The Deer Hunter, which takes place in rural Pennsylvania? As I learned last month, both scenes were actually shot in downtown Cleveland at, respectively, a Russian Orthodox church and a Ukrainian-American center. After Chicago, Cleveland is the most Eastern European of American cities, with emigrant populations from not only the former Soviet Union countries but also Romania, Serbia, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.

It makes sense that the Cleveland International Film Festival, seeking an identity different from a hundred other American fests, would showcase the cinema of Central and Eastern Europe. A jury prize is given to the best film of a dozen Central or Eastern Europe selections in competition. This year’s offerings included the autobiographical documentary Reconstruction, from Newton’s Irene Lusztig, in which the filmmaker heads to Bucharest to investigate what sent her Jewish-Romanian grandmother to jail for bank robbery.

During a long March weekend at the 27th Cleveland Fest, I saw Maja Weiss’s Deliverance-influenced Guardian of the Frontier, in which three frequently bare-breasted Slovenian babes confront the brute countryside, and Lilja 4-ever, a Russian-language feature from popular Swedish director Lukas Moodysson (Fucking Åmål; Together). Moodysson’s latest is the gruesome tale of a lost 16-year-old Russian girl who’s lured to Sweden for a job that turns out to be forced prostitution. I had to close my eyes to the barrage of sweaty, beefy Swedes having ugly, noisy orgasms in Lilja’s frail body.

The 10-day Cleveland Fest is an intelligent, sophisticated, and inviting one, smartly curated, and something adventurous New Englanders might consider next March; you can find out more at www.clevelandfilm.org. Hotels are cheap in Cleveland, and while there you can ease on down to the happening, pleasingly non-kitsch Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

RIP: Stan Brakhage died on March 9, of cancer, in Victoria, British Columbia, just days after his 70th birthday. One can’t help feeling humble in discussing the loss to cinema of America’s most significant experimental filmmaker — for some, the most important American filmmaker of them all. A long-time professor at the University of Colorado, Brakhage generously championed all kinds of films in his classes and lectures, including personal works made in Hollywood. His collections of essays on filmmakers he admired ran the gamut from Maya Deren to Laurel and Hardy. He was a curator, a film historian, a major cultural figure, a proselytizer for the avant-garde, and the most prolific of artists. A Web entry claims that he " made nearly 380 films, each lasting between nine seconds and four hours. " One of these, " Dog Star Man, " is preserved by the National Registry in Washington.

Back in 1999, when I was acting curator of the Harvard Film Archive, I organized, with the expert help of filmmaker Louise Bourque, an all-night Brakhage Be-In. The great man himself was in residence, delivering spontaneous oratory between groupings of his works and speaking on long past midnight. Stupendous!

How potent is Brakhage’s imagery? In a BU class I taught on " Transgressive Cinema, " I showed his 1959 classic " Window Water Baby Moving, " which celebrates on screen his then-wife Jane’s natural childbirth, the baby pushing out before your eyes. When the lights came on, we discovered an undergraduate male had fainted away on his desk!

So long, Stan! A day before his death, Brakhage told his current wife, Marilyn Brakhage, " I’ve had a wonderful life. Life is great. "