Rarely are there titles to explain where we are in Sandra Kogut’s mirthful, globehopping videos, which are being showcased this Tuesday and Wednesday at the Harvard Film Archive. That’s the celebratory McLuhan-esque point: everywhere on earth is sort of the same, the universal village of media images. Kogut, who will be present at all the HFA screenings, is the perfectly tuned global citizen, a Brazilian who speaks English, lives in France, and has Hungarian-Jewish grandparents and relatives living in Hungary.

The vagabond tone is set opening night (when the Boston Jewish Film Festival is a co-sponsor) by A Hungarian Passport (2001; April 29 at 7 p.m.). The Paris-based Kogut decides to take advantage of Hungary’s coming European Union membership by applying for a Hungarian passport. Her qualification is her Hungarian grandparents, who emigrated from Budapest to Brazil in 1937. As Kogut investigates her family history, which includes an ebullient dinner-table interview with her glowing grandma, she uncovers an ugly trail of 1937 anti-Semitism; it starts with the Hungarian official who permitted her grandfather’s exit so there’d be " one less dirty Jew " and ends with a secret Brazilian government circular that attempted to send incoming Jews back to Hitler’s Europe. (Unlike their less fortunate Jewish shipmates, Kogut’s grandparents were able to enter the country thanks to a well-placed bribe.)

In today’s Budapest, it’s the same story: an aging Hungarian man can’t believe that Kogut, who attracts his eye, is more than partly Jewish. I’m completely Jewish, she tells him. " Well, you can always deny it, " he chuckles.

A Hungarian Passport is also a broken-field jog through bureaucracy, jump-cutting among desk-bound slugs from France to Brazil to Hungary. After a year of commuting among consulates, Kogut receives a kind of passport, joining a low-rent new-citizen celebration in a government hall in Budapest. That’s the video’s priceless anthropological scene, gawky and endearing like early Milos Forman.

" Passengers of Orsay " (2003; April 30 at 7 p.m.) is a commissioned video for Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, with Kogut following random patrons through the huge museum until they arrive at their favorite painting or sculpture. She also turns her camera to others in the galleries, like the condescending lecturer who informs his flock, " This is a Manet, not a Monet. " Playing with " Passengers " is another short, " Adiu monde, or Pierre and Claire’s Story " (1998), a whimsical trip into the Pyrenees where a chorus of colorful villagers take turns telling the legendary romance of the beautiful Claire and Pierre, a shepherd with, alas, wanderlust.

" Parabolic People " (1991; April 30 at 9 p.m.) is a multi-screen, multiple-voice prose poem built from images of people in countries around the globe devoting 30 seconds each to doing whatever before a video camera. Some bounce, some sing, some make faces, some say solemn prayers. Kogut spins this stuff into a buoyant " we are the world " video party. Screening with it is " Here and There " (1993), a fictional short in which Brazilian actress Regina Casé, an earthy Anna Magnani type, portrays Tuquinha, a Rio blue-collar girl trying to decide whether to join her sister, who’s moved to a hoity-toity suburb. The answer seems easy: though she’s impoverished, Tuquinha enjoys a bouncy, zesty life, with friends in the community and dancing and singing in the Rio streets. Typical fun in the sweet, spirited video universe of Sandra Kogut.

ELIA SULEIMAN is a Palestinian who was born in Nazareth and has lived in the US and Israel, and whose films unfold in unexpected ways for didactic Third World cinema. His essay-like features — Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) and the current Divine Intervention (2001), which opens this week at the Kendall Square — are informed by film theory and film history. Not only are they inventive, they’re frequently witty. At Cannes last May, where Divine Intervention premiered, Suleiman talked militantly of " Palestinians living under fascism with Ariel Sharon, which is blunt and pornographic " and yet hoping that his film can have a salutary effect: " If I see people touching hands as they watch my movie, that’s the greatest compliment. "

Suleiman is at home with his split thinking. " I consider myself to be a very pacifist person, completely non-violent. But in my films, I try to uncensor the violence in my unconscious. " In Divine Intervention, a controversial fantasy episode has a Palestinian female ninja warrior taking on a host of Israeli soldiers. Suleiman’s cinema-informed description is priceless: " My ambition in that scene is to Bressonize The Matrix. "

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