Flag Wars (Tue., June 17, 10 p.m., WHYY-TV) Even if I hadn't just moved to Northern Liberties -- our "Home of the Brick Attacks" signs should be coming in any day now -- the resonance with Linda Goode Bryant and Laura Poitras' Flag Wars, which opens the 16th season of P.O.V., would be an uncomfortably apt one. Set in Columbus, Ohio, the film follows the gentrification of the city's Olde Towne [sic, sic] section, historically home to black families, but rapidly being bought up by white gay couples with an eye for Victorian structures and a knack for renovation. At least that's how the movie presents it, though given the feeding frenzy that eventually erupts -- one realtor hires an old-time band to play her mass open house, complete with maps of all the available properties within walking distance -- it's hard to believe a few enterprising straight folks wouldn't horn in on the action.

Be that as it may, there's a story worth centering in on about communities in conflict. That Olde Towne's lower-income black residents are being dramatically displaced is hardly in question; one man who traveled to Africa to become a Yoruba chief is forced by the newly instituted "historical district" to remove a sign that hangs over his door with his tribal name and house number. The complaining parties never explain their issue with the sign, though at one point it's suggested that its "Afrocentric" lettering might be threatening. On the other hand, there's the suggestion, too obliquely made, that what we're witnessing is the birth of Columbus' first openly gay neighborhood. One new resident observes that before rainbow flags started popping up all over Olde Towne, there was only a single block in all of Columbus where you could see them fly.

There are larger issues at work, of course, most notably the big C: capitalism. But the film's binary structure only allows so much flexibility, so when they focus, for example, on the plight of Linda Mitchell, an elderly black holdout who comes under increasing scrutiny from the zoning board for failing to bring her house up to code on the $501 she receives a month, it seems both tragic and slightly off-topic. True, the zoning board would almost certainly never have come around if it weren't for Olde Towne's soaring property values. But she would still have been living without heat, and the condition that's hardened her liver and eventually makes her stomach swell up like a basketball would still have been beyond her means to treat (though that doesn't excuse the crass lack of perspective of one new arrival, who carps, "If you don't want to renovate it, don't live in it.") Toward the film's end, tensions rise in Olde Towne, climaxing in a rash of violence directed at new, white residents. At an emergency meeting, new residents wonder if the assaults are gay-bashing, but they conclude that the motivations lie elsewhere. Their combined wealth and privilege remains the elephant in the room.

é Minha Cara/Thomas Allen Harris (Fri., June 13, 7 p.m., $10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) After screening his documentary diary, É Minha Cara, the first thing Thomas Allen Harris ought to teach in his Scribe Producer's Forum is how to use first-person voiceover. Though the credits list a voiceover coach, Harris' narration is thankfully free of the even-toned, affectless drone that afflicts so many would-be "personal" films. If you're going to go to the trouble of narrating your own movie, why talk as if none of the events in it mean anything to you, or as if you've just come out of an elocution class? Harris' prose still runs to the purple end of the spectrum, recounting his childhood in America and Tanzania, and his attempts to find a place somewhere in the world to reconcile those vastly different experiences. The images that accompany it, shot over decades with Harris' trusty Super-8 camera, provide a nicely down-to-earth contrast to the high-flown narration.

Once a Thief (Mon., June 16, 7 p.m., free, Chestnut Hill Library, 8711 Germantown Ave., 215-901-3771) Whet your whistle for next week's re-release of the Alain Delon-starring Le Cercle Rouge with this 1965 heist flick, putting Delon in the strange company of Ann-Margret, Van Heflin and Jack Palance. The first in the Chestnut Hill Film Group's "Buried Loot" series, which will show crime films from the '60s and '70s on the third Monday of every month.

The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer, Vol. 1 and 2 ($29.95 eachDVD) It"s something of a scandal that Jan Svankmajer isn"t recognized far and wide as one of the world"s greatest, most distinctive filmmakers, though working in the disreputable medium of animation hasn"t helped his case. A cursory viewing of any of the 14 short films split between these two discs is enough to instantly confirm the Prague surrealist"s uncanny instinct for primal fears and sudden disorientation. Uncommonly for a sui generis visionary, Svankmajer took a while to get his bearings: In the earliest few of the first volume"s films, beginning with A Game with Stones (1965), his third short, Svankmajer"s talent for bringing everyday objects to life is already in bloom, but the films feel abstract, disconnected -- just try and explain the logic of Et Cetera (1966). With The Flat (1968), everything clicks into place: Incorporating live action, the film visits all manner of confusions on a bewildered man who stumbles into a mysterious room with no exit, and where normal rules no longer apply. Featuring the first of many memorable encounters with a bowl of hot liquid in Svankmajer"s films, The Flat is a funny but disturbing portrait of confinement in a place where logic is irrelevant and survival a matter of chance. The sentiment is echoed in Vol. 2"s The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope (1983), a rare non-animated tale that adapts Poe as a parable of life behind the Iron Curtain, with a particularly chilling conclusion.

Though Svankmajer insists, in an illuminating documentary included on Vol. 2, that all his films are political entities, that only seems to be true if you follow the logic that surrealist art is of itself an act of protest against the rationalist ethos of communism. That is, unless you"d like to try and pull a political subtext out of the hilarious Meat Love (1988), in which two pieces of raw beef get down and dirty before ending up in the frying pan. The collection finishes with the overt agitprop of The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (1990) and the astonishing Food (1992), which acts as a career summation of Svankmajer"s obsession with consumption. Though these two volumes collect more than half of Svankmajer"s short films, there are several holes in the chronology, most notably the celebrated Jabberwocky (1971). Bring on volumes 3 and 4.