“The war is over. The traitors will be hunted down relentlessly. If necessary, we will kill half the country. Viva la muerte!” Imagine Forbidden Games set amid the carnage following the Spanish Civil War, with an undercurrent of guilt and sexual hysteria. The 1971 Viva La Muerte (aka Long Live Death) is a surreal portrait of a child trying to come to grips with his Republican father’s arrest after his mother betrayed him to the Fascists. Young Fando’s lessons emerge in violent childhood games and obscure fantasy sequences (shot on blurry videotape, then transferred to film through color filters), the distorted reflections of a fucked-up culture of betrayal and paranoia. And the adults are, if anything, even more twisted by guilt and denial. Director Fernando Arrabal comes from the same well source as Alejandro Jodorowsky (who directed the film version of Arrabal’s play Fando and Lis), and he similarly paints his film in blunt allegorical images of sexual anxiety, destructive madness, and violent fantasy. (See a man sewn into a cow’s carcass!) It’s provocative rather than poetic, but Arrabal gets his point across. (NR) SEAN AXMAKER

Aug. 19-25, 7 & 9 p.m., 2011