Bittersweet return of stolen treasures
There are more than 50 film festivals held in or near Boston each year, and a growing number of them are year-round operations, putting on one big annual event and then sneak previews, encore series, and other programs throughout the year.
One of the best organized of the bunch is the Boston Jewish Film Festival. Its main event is in November, but it also hosts Jewish- and Israel-themed movies in other forums and festivals year - round, such as its co-presentation of "The Bubble" at the Boston Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival earlier this month. A solid website at bjff.org and well put together e-mail missives from executive director Sara Rubin and her staff make it easy for fans and supporters to keep up with a steady schedule of programming.
Of special note is the BJFF's annual "Encores . . . and More" series, which comes to the Museum of Fine Arts this week with four films that were stand outs at the 2006 festival and two additional works.
The big movie is "The Rape of Europa," which won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the last festival. It opens the series on Thursday at 7 p.m. and will be followed by a discussion with Victoria Reed, an MFA curatorial research fellow for provenance specializing in the art of Europe, and Sarah Kianovsky, an assistant curator of paintings, sculpture , and decorative arts at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.
"The Rape of Europa" is writer/director Bonni Cohen's exploration of what happened to works of art during Hitler's reign. It uses Gustav Klimt's gorgeous and glittering masterpiece "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" as its starting point -- the painting was taken from a Viennese family in 1938 and returned to the family just last year. (It has since been acquired by Ronald Lauder and now resides at the Neue Galerie in New York.) The movie looks at the broader story of how many works were taken, where they have been in the past 70 years, and the legal and political issues surrounding restitution claims.
Cohen, who got her bachelor's degree from Tufts University in 1987, drew from the book "The Rape of Europa" by Lynn H. Nicholas . "The history of looting is not just about objects," Nicholas writes at the film's website. "It is a story full of personal tragedy and loss, of bittersweet recovery of the fragments of vanished cultures and lives. The combination of devastating destruction and the most beautiful objects of civilization is very powerful and is made even more so by the visual medium of film. I was quite overwhelmed by actually seeing images of the stories I knew so well."
"Europa" will play the MFA seven times between Thursday and June 14. Other encore movies include Richard Dembo's "Nina's Home," a drama about a "house-of-hope" orphanage for Jewish children who survived World War II, and "Be Fruitful and Multiply," Shosh Shlam's 50 - minute look at what life is like in large Orthodox families, including one with 16 children. The full schedule is online at bjff.org, or call 617-244-9899.
SOMERVILLE YOUTH FILM FESTIVAL: It's true that at its cheesiest, community-access television is host to "Wayne's World"-style programming: self-indulgent, poorly put together, and mind-numbing to all but the friends of the knuckleheads on screen.
But at its best, community-access stations are places where people can get training on video equipment and learn how to work together in teams. Along the way, they might even produce art. And like the Internet, community television is one of the few media outlets open to regular folks.
See for yourself where the work of 30 teenagers who have been spending time in workshops at the Somerville Community Access Television station lands. They've put together 10 videos over the last few months. Among them: a documentary about a teen recording artist, one music video in Haitian Creole and another re enacting the TLC song "Waterfalls," and a movie trailer.
They'll be presenting the work and taking questions on Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre. The event is free.
SCREENINGS OF NOTE: The Harold Pinter series continues at the Harvard Film Archive this week, with Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, and Robert Mitchum in "The Last Tycoon" tonight at 7 and tomorrow at 5 p.m., and Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons in "The French Lieutenant's Woman" on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 9 p.m. (617-495-4700 and hcl.harvard.edu/hfa).
Three years after the Coolidge Corner Theatre presented him the first annual Coolidge Award, Chinese director Zhang Yimou is getting a 10-film tribute series at the Brattle Theatre starting Wednesday and running through June 7. On tap are "Raise the Red Lantern" (a new 35mm print, playing on Wednesday and Thursday), "Ju Dou" (Friday), "House of Flying Daggers" (June 6) and, also on June 6, last year's "Curse of the Golden Flower" (617-876-6837 and brattlefilm.org).
Also at the Brattle, there will be 24 hours of Japanese anime from noon Saturday to noon next Sunday. Nancy Novotny, the English voice of Yomi on "Azumanga Daioh" and Madlax on "Madlax , " will be the special guest.
And the Coolidge Corner Theatre starts a Sunday mornings in June program of silent film classics accompanied by live music next week at 11 . The first program is "Clash of the Wolves" featuring puppy pin-up Rin Tin Tin, with live piano by Martin Marks, author of "Music and the Silent Film" (617-734-2500 and coolidge.org).
Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com. 
