Most viewers in this country first discovered Medem with the release of his Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1998; Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m.). It’s a fair introduction to his methods and madness, but not the best realization of them. Two lovers, the palindromically named Otto (Fele Martínez) and Ana (Najwa Nimri), are fated to be spiritually connected but physically divided. Having first met in a collision in a school playground, they continue to collide through the film’s baroque, protean plot, through Oedipal complications and coy coincidences, ending up, through a not always convincing dream logic, at the frozen end of the world of the title. Medem’s fluid mimicry of the free associations and dead ends of consciousness is counterpointed by the precision of his imagery and composition. But despite the Donne-like elegance of the film’s final visual conceit, the lasting impression is one of artifice. It’s hard to forget that this is all a construct. As Otto puts it, “I had no destiny, so I had to make one up.”

Medem had more success making up his second and perhaps best feature, The Red Squirrel (1993; Friday and Sunday at 9 p.m.). It opens with another collision: a motorcyclist (Emma Suárez) flies through the guardrail of a bridge and falls onto the beach below. Watching is Jota (Nancho Novo), who’s been standing on the bridge contemplating suicide. He rushes to aid the fallen motorcyclist, a beautiful woman who has apparently lost her memory. Identifying himself as her boyfriend when she is taken to the hospital, he names her Lisa and takes her away to a lakeside resort — the Red Squirrel of the title. There he proceeds to reinvent the amnesiac’s identity, seeking to create a substitute for the real Lisa, a woman who abandoned him.

A vertiginous premise to be sure, and Medem sustains that tone with a kaleidoscopic swirl of flashbacks, fantasies, enjambed points of view (one apparently that of an actual red squirrel), and narrative entanglements. At the resort Jota and “Lisa” befriend another family, and together the couple invent lies and lives for the benefit of their new acquaintances. The notion of identity shivers into infinity like the repeated image in parallel mirrors. Nonetheless, a faith in true love abides — or at least in sex, as Squirrel indulges in some remarkably perverse and poignant love scenes. A frenzy of unlikely occurrences at the end doesn’t detract from the intensity of the lover’s passion.

Water is a recurrent motif in The Red Squirrel, as is ice in Lovers of the Arctic Circle. With Earth (1996; Saturday and Tuesday at 9 p.m.) Medem shows that though his films may be elemental, they’re never simple. Angel (Carmelo Gómez, who plays the heavy in The Red Squirrel) suffers not from amnesia but from a split personality — he believes he’s half dead, his better half an angel who torments him with voiceovers describing the enigmas of the cosmos and in general giving him bad advice. Ángel is driving through barren farmland on his way to fumigate vineyards for woodlice when a shepherd is killed by a bolt of lightning. This prompts an ongoing dialogue with his alter ego about heaven and earth that persists when he drops in on a local family and falls in love with Ángela (Emma Suárez, here with her faculties intact). Or is it his angel half who’s in love? Either way, it means trouble: Angela is married to Patricio, the local brute. And besides, there’s the nymphomaniacal Mari (Silke Klein) to consider — though she’s Patricio’s mistress.

Of all Medem’s films, Earth is the least grounded, flying off on tangents about death, time, the cosmos, wild boars, and the mysterious earthy flavor the lice impart to the local wine. Medem’s near-hallucinatory gift for image and montage remains (shot in ocherous tints, the film’s barren landscapes are at times peopled by armies of fumigators in white spacesuits — it’s like Simon of the Desert as an Outer Limits episode). So does his faith in love; it goes a long way around the block to get there, but Earth confirms Medem’s belief in the ecstasy and the tragedy of desire.