The Film Festival Delivers, From 31 Countries China's "Postman\" And Italy's \"the Postman" Leave Their Stamp. But There's Plenty More: Drama, Documentaries, Animation Too.

They say the postman always rings twice, and at the fourth annual Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema you might be saved by the bell. Among the 79 shorts and 61 features from 31 countries that will be on view from May 3 to 14 are the Chinese movie Postman and the Italian film The Postman. One is about a letter carrier who sneaks peeks at the correspondence he delivers; the other is about an Italian fisherman recruited to deliver fan letters to his isle's newest resident, exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

Neruda isn't the only stranger in a strange land at PFWC 1995, a festival that also celebrates pro football, Icelandic rock and kung fu dervishes. Neruda's condition, however, is the dominant theme of this year's event, which opens with Kayo Hatta's Picture Bride, a romance about how the director's Japanese grandparents met in Hawaii's cane fields.

It is also the theme of two of the festival's masterpieces, both Oedipal tragicomedies, Funny Bones by Peter Chelsom (of Hear My Song) and Drawn From Memory by Paul Fierlinger.

Chelsom's film stars Oliver Platt as a failed American stand-up comic who runs away from his successful, suffocating father (Jerry Lewis) and goes to Blackpool, England to mine the source of British music-hall comedy. Animator Fierlinger's film is his personal odyssey about coming to terms with his father, a Czech diplomat whose career in Japan and the United States and China left his son without a country.

You might say that this year PFWC is about the contrast between filmmakers looking outward and those looking inward. If stranger in a strange land is the dominant theme, then natives in a familiar land is the harmony. By shining the festival spotlight this year on Krzysztof Kieslowski, Fridrik Thor Fridriksson and NFL Films, PFWC puts special emphasis on the movies of undersung Polish, Icelandic and American stylists.

Kieslowski, the Polish director whose recent films Red and Blue have earned him international acclaim, will be represented by Decalogue, 10 hourlong films made in 1988 and "loosely and agnostically" inspired by each of the Ten Commandments. In showcasing Kieslowski's Decalogue, PFWC enables those already familiar with the director's work to see the source material for his more recent films. And for Kieslowski initiates, the Decalogue is a total immersion in the world of one of cinema's most original minds.