Film gems captivate at Palm Springs festival

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — Now that all the hoopla of Sundance is finally behind us, it's time to go back and look at that other January film festival that takes place in Southern California for two weeks immediately preceding Sundance — and, usually, in a considerably warmer climate!

Park City's temperatures were even slightly colder than usual, but Palm Springs — as with the rest of the nation — was also chillier. Even getting down, for a couple of days, to a surprising 24 degrees — just two degrees above the record for that palm-covered desert city.

Nevertheless, for both the Sundance and Palm Springs festivals — which are devoted to the best in new cinema from around the world — it was the films themselves, of course, which counted most.

As usual, the major focus at Palm Springs was foreign films — including the more than 50 submissions from the world's various film industries for the best foreign-film Oscar.

Of the five films finally selected to compete for this year's Academy Award, I'm putting my money on Germany's gripping and intriguing "The Lives of Others" (concerning the wire-tapping of actors and directors in then-Communist East Germany).

If Russia had nominated a film called "The Italian" — instead of their co-production with Ukraine and Finland called "9th Company" — I think it would not only have been among the five finalists, but might have gone on to capture the Oscar.

Already playing now in public theaters in Los Angeles and New York, "The Italian" (an impressive feature-film debut by director Andrei Kravchuk) is a film simply not to be missed. As painful as it is tender, the film concerns a little Russian boy, abandoned by his mother and put into a highly questionable and run-down institution for foundlings.

When an Italian couple begins arrangements to purchase the boy and take him back to Italy (thus the film's title), he opts to run away in an attempt to make one last effort to find his real mother

Though not in the running for this year's Oscar, "The Italian" is nevertheless a real winner.

Also debuting at Palm Springs in January and now playing in public theaters all throughout the United States are two very excellent films that both happen to be from Mexico — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Babel" and Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth." Both are up for several Oscars and are as good as anything from the United States.