‘Memoirs of a River’

Judit Elek’s lucid yet passionate 1992 Hungarian film is based on an historical injustice: the 19th-Century Tizseaszlar trial, one of the most famous anti-Semitic incidents in Hungarian history. Elek shapes her film like a provincial epic veering into nightmare as a crew of rural Jewish and Catholic loggers, drifting on their raft past the countryside, encounter the floating corpse of a woman. When the loggers are thrown into jail by a furiously prejudiced commissar (Janos Acs) on a trumped-up charge of ritual murder, the film’s style gets tighter and harder. The film bristles with moral outrage, and the courtroom confrontations between the innocents and their lying accusers become a grisly theatrical parade (Bravo Wednesday at 8:30 p.m., Thursday at 10:30 a.m.).